The Listings

Published: April 15, 2005

KEN JOHNSON

* 'EDGE OF DESIRE: RECENT ART IN INDIA', Asia Society, 725 Park Avenue at 70th Street, (212)288-6400 and at the Queens Museum of Art, New York City Building, Flushing Meadows, Corona Park, Queens, (718)592-9700 both through June 5. Also, "Fatal Love: South Asian American Art Now," Queens Museum of Art through June 5. "Edge of Desire," spread over two venues, is a highly selective, multi-generational survey of different kinds of contemporary art being made in India. The senior figure here, K.G. Subramanyan, born in 1924, has over the years embraced craft, folk, and tribal traditions, as well as popular culture and academic modernism. The show does the same in work from mid-career figures like Nalini Malani and Vivan Sundaram, to newcomers like Shilpa Gupta, Swarna and Manu Chitrakar, and L.N. Tallur. The smaller portion of the show is at Asia Society; the more expansive and varied section in Queens. Also in Queens is "Fatal Love," a lively but subtle showcase of young artists, many of them women, many living in New York. This show alone is worth a trip to Flushing Meadows. Park Avenue location hours: Tuesdays through Sundays 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Fridays, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Admission: $10; 65+, $7; students with ID, $5; members and under 16, free.
HOLLAND COTTER

"MAX ERNST: A RETROSPECTIVE" remains at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, (212)535-7710, through July 10. Max Ernst (1891-1976) is one of modernism's mystery men. He is everywhere in the history of European art between the wars, closely associated with two of the century's wild-and-craziest movements, Dada and Surrealism, yet he never quite materializes. Both despite and because of his elusiveness he remains an artist of some interest, and there are intriguing things in this large survey. They range from some of the earliest paintings to be officially labeled Surrealist, to near-abstract images generated by chance techniques, to examples of the collage-style books some consider Ernst's masterworks. On the positive side, his refusal of a signature style is evidence of his anti-authoritarian instincts. Too often, however, it produced art that looks like brilliant busywork. Only when he is responding to specific events, like war, does his art snap into focus. Hours and admission: see above.
COTTER

* TIM HAWKINSON, Whitney Museum of American Art, Madison Avenue at 75th Street, (212)570-3676, through May 29. On the gee-whiz meter, Tim Hawkinson skews high. His midcareer retrospective, like a mad scientists' fair of screwball contraptions, hopscotches from one dexterous tour de force to the next. Each requires some head-scratching decipherment, inviting admiration for its doggedness, while not straining too hard to earn a viewer's love. Feats of physical fancy, when so dizzily executed, can be their own justification. Mr. Hawkinson's larger purpose, you might say, is simply wonderment. At the same time the art borrows a healthy strain of ludicrous wit from Samuel Beckett, who knew a thing or two about how to clown around smartly. Hours: Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Friday 1 to 9 p.m.; closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Admission: $12; students and 62+, $9.50; children 12 and under, free.
KIMMELMAN

* 'HUGO BOSS PRIZE 2004: RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA,' Solomon R. Guggeheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, (212)423-3500, through May 11. For his Guggenheim solo show, Rikrit Tirvanija, winner of the 2004 Hugo Boss prize, has built a low-power television station from inexpensive materials in one of the museum's galleries, and papered the walls with instructions on how anyone and everyone can do the same. What looks like a glorified science-fair project comes with specific social context. The airwaves, which carry transmissions, are technically United States government property. Unlicensed broadcast is illegal and licenses are hard to get. Federal control of its communications resources has further tightened in recent years, inspiring a wave of illegal transmissions from stations like this one, which could contribute to grassroots protest against perceived restrictions on first amendment rights. Here, Mr. Tiravanija's art-linked-to-life aesthetic moves outside the art-world to the real world, a significant, potentially far-reaching shift. Hours and admission: see above.
COTTER

'LITTLE BOY: THE ARTS OF JAPAN'S EXPLODING SUBCULTURE,' Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street (212)832-1155, through July 24. With Godzilla and Hello Kitty presiding, this eye-boggling show traces the unexamined legacy of World War II as played out in Japan's popular culture and its high incidence of mushroom clouds, bionic heroes, building-crunching monsters and hyper-cute cartoon characters. Masterminded by the artist-writer-entrepreneur Takashi Murakami (of Vuitton bag fame), and organized in collaboration with the Public Arts Fund, it reveals how this culture was twisted and darkened by the otaku, or geek, subculture, which has in turn influenced the work of younger artists like Yoshitomo Nara, Chinatsu Ban and the artist currently known as Mr.
ROBERTA SMITH

'PORTRAITS OF AN AGE: PHOTOGRAPHY IN GERMANY AND AUSTRIA, 1900-1938,' Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue, at 86th Street, (212)628-6200, through June 6. More than 100 faces make up the cast of this show. The portraits were shot by 35 photographers active in the two countries, among them Lotte Jacobi, Josef Albers, Gisele Freund, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and August Sander. Their images not only give a sense of the rich cultural life in Austria and Germany before the Nazis but also help trace the history of photography during the period. More important, this savvy show homes in on the changing ways people presented themselves in an era of rapidly turning social values.
GLUECK

* 'CY TWOMBLY: FIFTY YEARS OF WORKS ON PAPER,' Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, (212)570-3676, through May 8. Despite the "works on paper" label, this is basically a show of paintings. It starts in the 1950's, when Mr. Twombly, closely entwined with the artist Robert Rauschenberg, developed a personal anti-aesthetic in which scribbling was a form draftsmanship, gouging and scratching was gestural painting. After moving to Italy, words appeared frequently in the work: obscenities, the names of gods, quotations from Roman epics, scraps of Romantic poetry. It was as if Western cultural history was unfolding on the walls of a toilet stall. Closer to the present the work turns lush and perfumed, into a kind of horticultural expressionism that is both appetizing and uningratiating. Hours and admission: see above.
COTTER

Galleries: Uptown

PETER HOWSON, 'CHRISTOS ANESTE,' Flowers, 1000 Madison Avenue at 77th Street, (212)439-1700, through May 7. Working with a sharp pencil on small square panels in a profusely detailed, expressionistic and sometimes hallucinatory style that harks back to the Northern Renaissance, this British artist brings impressive skill and tragi-comic verve to subjects like the trials of Jesus, the temptation of St. Anthony and the delusions of Don Quixote. His small, brushy and comparatively sentimental paintings are disappointing, but there are fewer of them.
JOHNSON

Galleries: SoHo

* '3 X ABSTRACTION: NEW METHODS OF DRAWING BY HILMA AF KLIMT, EMMA KUNZ AND AGNES MARTIN,' The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, (212)219-2166, through May 21. This fascinating and beautiful exhibition presents mostly abstract, geometric drawings by three women thought to have been motivated largely by spiritual purposes. The Swedish af Klimt and the Swiss Kunz were mystics for whom drawing was a way to represent or channel supernatural dimensions of the universe. Martin, on the other hand, was a Modernist more interested in the Zen-esque experience of the here and now in art and nature.
JOHNSON

Galleries: Chelsea

ERIC FISCHL, Mary Boone, 541 West 24th Street, (212)752-2929, through April 23. Like the ones in his last show at this gallery, Mr. Fischl's paintings are based on his own photographs of hired models behaving like jaded sophisticates during a daytime love-making session or at home after a late night party. The paintings are suavely made with wide brushes in muted colors and they capture complex patterns of light broken up by venetian blinds. But a frustrating vagueness about what is going on in the pictures limits the psychological intrigue.
JOHNSON

MARK HEYER, Lohin Geduld, 531 West 25th Street, (212)675-2656, through April 23. Mr. Heyer's small, folksy narrative paintings of subjects like a tornado approaching a Midwestern farm, a circus act under the big top and sexy women getting dressed in their rooms look as if they were made in the 1920's and 30's by a simple-minded colleague of Edward Hopper and Charles Burchfield. That they are actually clever Postmodernist simulations does not prevent them from being nostalgically enchanting.
JOHNSON

'IAN KIAER: THE GREY CLOTH' Tanya Bonakdar Gallery 521 West 21st Street, Chelsea (212)414-4144, through April 30. Inspired by a little-known 1914 novel by the German architecture critic Paul Scheerbart, the five installation pieces in this show work quite well as a neurasthenic environment whose arrangements of pale monochromes and pale found objects abjectly elegize the building blocks of modernism.
SMITH

JONAS MEKAS: 'FRAGMENTS OF PARADISE,' Maya Stendhal, 545 West 20th Street, (212)366-1549, through April 30. Born in Lithuania in 1922, Mr. Mekas survived a Nazi forced labor camp to become one of the most influential and revered members of the New York avant garde film-making community. This retrospective sampler presents short and long, typically low-production, diaristic films from the past five decades on video screens. Also, a cacophonous, 12-monitor installation shows 24 hours in the life of the artist and his family, a piece that was inspired by an idea of Ferdinand Leger's.
JOHNSON

HERVÉ DI ROSA: 'THE SOLO GROUP SHOW,' Haim Chanin, 210 Eleventh Avenue at 24th Street, (646)230-7200, through April 23. An antic chameleon of an artist, this French Neo-Popster presents more than 500 small, framed paintings and drawings in four large clusters. Mr. di Rosa's ability to imitate many different styles -- including underground comics, geometric abstraction, Surrealism and realism -- is impressive, but it is the gleeful irreverence and love of absurdity holding it all together that wins you over.
JOHNSON

MAGNUS VON PLESSEN, Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street (212)206-9300, through April 23. In the artist's eagerness to suggest fluctuating moods and rapid shifting of perceptions, and to avoid the "literalness" that painting can fall into, he puts down fugitive images (often derived initially from photographs) that are done in by paint or the lack of it. One example is "Discontinued," a large teetery structure that amounts to a suggestion of a building with most of its vitals left out. Paint, or its strategic omission, the artist seems to say, trumps imagery. In more talented hands, this is often true, but not here.
GLUECK

Last Chance

JOHN ALTOON: 'PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS, 1961-67,' Luise Ross Gallery, 568 Broadway, at Prince Street, SoHo, (212)343-2161, closing tomorrow. In the last years of his short life, Altoon (1925-1969) broke out of the freewheeling West Coast mode of Abstract Expressionism to zero in on more personal images -- some dreamy, others explicitly sexual, still others biomorphic doodles -- that floated through his fantasy. One of the most amusing -- and accessible -- of these works is ''Untitled (Bathtub)'' of 1967. It depicts a woman bathing as a poodle awaits her emergence. But her attention is riveted on a small demonic man who has set fire to her bath water. Altoon's deft, light touch mates well with his fine sense of the silly.
GLUECK

ALYSON SHOTZ, 'MOMENT IN TIME AND SPACE,' Derek Eller, 526-30 West 25th Street, Chelsea, (212)206-6411, closing tomorrow. This resourceful sculptor has hung an expansive, undulating, floor-to-ceiling curtain in the middle of the gallery. It was made by stapling together thousands of ovals cut from plastic magnifying sheets. The kaleidoscopic optical effects are delightfully confounding.
JOHNSON

STANLEY WHITNEY, Esso, 531 West 26th Street, Chelsea, (212)560-9728, closing tomorrow You might not have thought the tired old genre of grid-based abstract painting still had in it works as buoyantly radiant as these. Painted with a dry, flat and slightly brushy touch, Mr. Whitney's blocks of near-pure color, separated by horizontal bands like books on a bookshelf, have a syncopated chromatic rhythm that is a pleasure to behold.
JOHNSON
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Theater

A selective listing by critics of The Times: New or noteworthy Broadway, Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway shows this weekend. Approximate running times are in parentheses. * denotes a highly recommended show.
+ means discounted tickets were available at the Theater Development Fund's TKTS booth for performances last Friday and Saturday nights.
++ means discounted tickets were available at the TKTS booth for last Friday night.
Full reviews of current shows, additional listings, showtimes and tickets: nytimes.com/theater.

Broadway

+ 'ALL SHOOK UP' Compared to its sickly cousin, ''Good Vibrations'' (that's the Beach Boys musical), this synthetic jukebox musical, inspired by the songs of Elvis Presley, looks like Jose Canseco at his steroid-plumped peak. But the relative slickness of ''All Shook Up,'' which features the appealing Cheyenne Jackson as an Elvis-like roustabout, only highlights the emptiness of this ''Mamma Mia!''-style story of a pleasure-challenged small town, directed by Christopher Ashley. In a pint-size theater with a campy young cast, ''All Shook Up'' might be a moderate hoot. Inflated to Broadway proportions, it's a mind-numbing holler (2:10). Palace Theater, 1564 Broadway, at 47th Street, (212)307-4100. Tuesdays at 7 p.m.; Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m.; Wednesdays and Saturdays at 2 p.m.; Sundays at 3 p.m. Tickets: $19.55 to $100.
BEN BRANTLEY

'JULIUS CAESAR' Those cruel forces of history known as the dogs of war are on a rampage in Daniel Sullivan's carnage-happy interpretation of Shakespeare's tragedy. Dripping blood and breathing smoke, these specters are chewing up everything in their path: friends, Romans, countrymen, blank verse and even the noblest movie star of them all. That's Denzel Washington, who plays the conflicted Brutus. As the most important passenger on this fast, bumpy ride of a show, Mr. Washington does not embarrass himself. But despite several moving evocations of Brutus's ambivalence, he can't help getting lost amid the wandering, mismatched crowd assembled here. The cast includes the classically polished Colm Feore as Cassius (2:40). Belasco Theater, 111 West 44th Street, (212)239-6200. Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m.; Wednesdays and Saturdays at 2 p.m. Sundays at 3 p.m. Tickets: $51.25 to $101.25.
BRANTLEY

* 'DOUBT, A PARABLE' (Pulitzer Prize, Best Play 2005). This tight, absorbing and expertly acted play by John Patrick Shanley is far more complex than surface descriptions might suggest. Set in the Bronx in 1964, it is structured as a clash of wills and generations between Sister Aloysius (Cherry Jones), the head of a parochial school, and Father Flynn (Brian F. O'Byrne), the young priest who may or may not be too fond of the boys in his charge. The play's balance of conflicting viewpoints, its austere institutional setting and its sensational front-page subject at first bring to mind those tidy topical melodramas of truth and falsehood that were once so popular. But Mr. Shanley makes subversive use of musty conventions. ''Doubt'' hews closely to its reassuringly sturdy, familiar form, the better to explore aspects of thought and personality that are anything but solid. And under the eloquently reserved direction of Doug Hughes, Ms. Jones and Mr. O'Byrne, both superb, find startling precision in ambiguity (1:30). Walter Kerr Theater, 219 West 48th Street, (212)239-6200. Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m.; Wednesdays and Saturdays at 2 p.m.; Sundays at 3 p.m. Tickets: $26.25 to $90.25.
BRANTLEY

+'THE GLASS MENAGERIE' Memory, which is notorious for playing tricks on people, pulls off some doozies in this narcoticized production of Tennessee Williams's classic drama. Staged by David Leveaux, this revival suggests that to recollect the past is to see life as if it had occurred underwater, in some viscous sea through which people swim slowly and blindly. Folks drown in this treacherous element. Unfortunately, that includes the show's luminous but misdirected and miscast stars: Jessica Lange, who brings a sleepy, neurotic sensuality to the role of the vital and domineering Amanda Wingfield, and Christian Slater, who is a red-hot firebrand as her poetical son, Tom (2:30). Ethel Barrymore Theater, 243 West 47th Street; (212)239-6200. Tuesdays at 7 p.m.; Thursdays and Fridays at 8 p.m.; Wednesdays at 2 and 8 p.m.; Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays at 3 p.m. Tickets: $71.25 to $91.25.
BRANTLEY

+'JACKIE MASON: FRESHLY SQUEEZED' Jackie Mason and ''Spamalot'' make an odd Broadway pair facing off across 44th Street, but reactions to the two shows are remarkably similar: lots of laughter, much of it indiscriminate. Mr. Mason's new show is being promoted as a feast of exclusively new material, and this is not false advertising. But it's Mr. Mason's style and not his subject matter that signifies. Mr. Mason has so cunningly manufactured and marketed his dyspeptic comic persona -- the herky-jerky movements used to embellish the routines, the voice that's like a sinus infection with a bad back -- that he may soon be able to refine all actual jokes out of his act, and still slay 'em. That's chutzpah. and quite a talent, too (2:05). Helen Hayes Theater, 240 West 44th Street, (212)239-6200. Tuesdays through Fridays at 8 p.m.; Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays at 3 p.m. Tickets: $81. 25.
CHARLES ISHERWOOD

'MONTY PYTHON'S SPAMALOT' This staged re-creation of the mock-medieval movie ''Monty Python and the Holy Grail'' is basically a singing scrapbook for Python fans. Still, it seems safe to say that such a good time is being had by so many people (including the cast) that this fitful, eager celebration of inanity and irreverence will find a large and lucrative audience among school-age children and grown-ups in touch with the nerdy, nose-thumbing 12-year-olds within. Directed by Mike Nichols, with a cast that includes Tim Curry, David Hyde Pierce, Hank Azaria and the toothsome scenery chewer Sara Ramirez (2:20). Shubert Theater, 225 West 44th Street, (212)239-6200. Tuesdays at 7 p.m.; Thursdays and Fridays at 8 p.m.; Wednesdays and Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays at 3 p.m. Tickets: $36.25 to $101.25.
BRANTLEY

+'STEEL MAGNOLIAS' In Robert Harling's freeze-dried comedy, people speak in the kinds of sentences that wind up embroidered on decorative pillows: ''There is no such thing as natural beauty,'' or, ''I'd rather have 30 minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special.'' Cute and sassy or sweet and soggy, the dialogue sometimes achieves the distinction of being all these things. But despite an ensemble featuring high-profile veterans of stage, film and television (including Christine Ebersole, Delta Burke and Marsha Mason), sitting through this portrait of friendship among Southern women, set in a beauty parlor in small-town Louisiana, is like watching nail polish dry (2:20). Lyceum Theater, 149 West 45th Street, (212)239-6200. Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m.; Sundays at 3 p.m. Tickets: $46.75 to $86.25.
BRANTLEY

Off Broadway

'CALIGULA.' Playing the famously vainglorious Roman ruler Caligula reinvented as a postmodern actor-cum-director, gasbag moralist and irreverent critic of biographies about himself, Andre De Shields is phenomenal. This particularly gifted and disciplined actor blasts Alfred Preisser and Randy Weiner's play onto an electrified plane where histrionic egomania and sweaty petulance seem like the only ways to fill a stage. A Classical Theater of Harlem production directed by Mr. Preisser, this Caligula is an original work, not an adaptation of Camus, and like the company's 2003 hit production of Genet's ''Blacks,'' the show makes resonant use of a generalized, shabby circus setting and interactions with the audience that deliberately risk offense. Consistency of ideas isn't the show's strength, but the diminutive Mr. De Shields makes it all worthwhile, towering over the 13 other actors with his outsized energy and charisma (1:25). Classical Theater of Harlem at the Harlem School of the Arts Theater, 645 St. Nicholas Avenue, between 141st and 142nd Streets, (212)868-4444. Tickets: $25.
JONATHAN KALB

'DECO DIVA' Kara Wilson makes her entrance in an emerald green evening dress. She is the Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka, living in Paris in 1939. In the course of the play, Ms. Wilson paints a copy of Lempicka's ''Beautiful Rafaela,'' which feels like a parlor trick but adds needed texture to this stylish but lightweight work. After her daughter was born, Lempicka took up painting, in the new Art Deco style, finding both career satisfaction and financial success. Ms. Wilson, who is likably insouciant as Lempicka, occasionally breaks into song. The show ends with a little Kurt Weill, which seems appropriate (1:05) 59E59 Theaters, 59 East 59th Street, (212)279-4200. Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8:30 p.m.; Sundays at 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays at 2:30 p.m.; Sundays at 3:30 p.m. Tickets: $25.
ANITA GATES

+'THE FALSE SERVANT' Decked out in a smart black tailcoat and shiny leather boots, her hair styled in a sleek blond cap, Martha Plimpton cuts a debonair figure in the Classic Stage Company's revival of this unusually chilly Marivaux comedy. Ms. Plimpton's dashing performance imbues the proceedings with a bright, puckish spirit, but Mr. Kulick's efficient but mechanical staging emphasizes the nip that never leaves the air. Its stark simplicity underscores the sensation that we might almost be watching a Shakespeare comedy unfolding in a cold-storage warehouse (2:00). Classic Stage Company, 136 East 13th Street, East Village, (212)279-4200. Tuesdays through Fridays at 8 p.m.; Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m.; this Sunday and May 1 at 3 p.m. Tickets: 45 to $50.
ISHERWOOD

++'GOING TO ST. IVES' Questions of life and death are probed and settled over pots of tea in Lee Blessing's thoughtful, tidy two-hander. May N'Kame (L. Scott Caldwell), the mother of a bloodthirsty African dictator, and Dr. Cora Gage (Vivienne Benesch), a respected British eye surgeon, are brought together by circumstance: May's eyesight is failing. Their relationship will have fateful consequences for both. Mr. Blessing has a handy knack for domesticating seemingly unruly subject matter: the violent legacy of colonialism, the responsibility of Western governments to confront the carnage in Africa, the moral argument for sacrificing one life to save many. But if the play's structural and thematic niceties are intellectually pleasing, they also imbue it with a hollow, manufactured quality that fine performances cannot entirely disguise (2:00). Primary Stages, 59E59Theaters, 59 East 59th Street, (212)279-4200. Tuesdays at 7 p.m.; Wednesday at 2 p.m.; Thursdays and Fridays at 8 p.m.; Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays at 3 p.m. Tickets: $55.
ISHERWOOD

+'BONNIE PARKER' In the middle of her deadly one-woman show, Dixie Lee Sedgwick suddenly does a cartwheel. And at one point she inexplicably gets down on the floor and poses like the young woman in Andrew Wyeth's ''Christina's World.'' There is probably a lot of rich material in the psyche of Parker, who made her name as the bank-robbing partner of Clyde Barrow in Depression-era America and died with him at 23), but Ms. Sedgwick gives her audience only a one-dimensional character, a young Texas woman who is bored before she meets Barrow and dissatisfied afterward, and the exposition is consistently awkward, This is not to say that Ms. Sedgwick does not have ability or promise, only that this is an immature work (2:00). John Houseman Studio Theater, 450 West 42nd Street, (212)868-4444. Mondays, Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays at 3:30 p.m. Tickets: $49.95.
GATES

'THIS IS HOW IT GOES' Ben Stiller, famous in movies as an everyklutz, is the ideal guide for escorting audiences through the slippery maze of Neil LaBute's extended ploy of a play, directed by George C. Wolfe. In this story of an interracial romantic triangle, Mr. Stiller gives an artfully layered, deceptive performance that leaves you thinking it's a pity he had to portray a moral construct instead of a character. The same might be said of Jeffrey Wright as his surly rival. Fortunately, the wonderful Amanda Peet, exuding an aura of fractured confidence, is allowed to exist outside of the confining dimensions of a sermon (1:30). Public Theater/Anspacher Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, (212)239-6200. Tuesdays through Fridays at 8 p.m.; Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays at 2 and 7 p.m. Tickets: $60.
BRANTLEY

'WHAT OF THE NIGHT' A solo show starring Jane Alexander as Djuna Barnes, the literary adventurer best known for her spooky modernist novel ''Nightwood,'' this theatrical curio combines some of the standard facets of dead-celebrity stage plays with the more rarefied and often inscrutable behaviors endemic in the world of performance art. Conceived by Ms. Alexander, choreographer and director Birgitta Trommler and Noreen Tomassi, it provides a sense of Barnes' strange, hallucinatory prose, but remains a confusing amalgam of biography and literary homage: a morass of cranky chitchat, pointless stage business and arcane oration (1:15). Lucille Lortel Theater, 121 Christopher Street, Greenwich Village, (212)279-4200. Tuesdays at 7 p.m.; Wednesdays through Fridays at 8 p.m.; Saturdays at 2:30 p.m. and 8 p.m.; Sundays at 2:30 p.m. Tickets: $55.
ISHERWOOD

Off Off Broadway

'THE AUDIENCE' This new musical turns the footlights on Rows A through E at a fictional Broadway production. Conceived and directed by Jack Cummings III, the show has been assembled from contributions by a few dozen writers, composers and lyricists. Whiplash-inducing fluctuations in quality and style are not a problem, however: while there are moments both sentimental and funny here, most of the contributors seem to have obeyed an official mandate to stick strictly to stereotype (1:40). Connelly Theater, 220 East Fourth Street, East Village, (212)352-3101. Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m.; Saturdays at 2 p.m.; Sundays at 3 p.m. Tickets: $19.
ISHERWOOD

'FINNEGANS WAKE' The idea of basing a musical on James Joyce's epic and near-impenetrable feast of language, ''Finnegans Wake,'' sounds perilously close to material for a skit on ''Saturday Night Live.'' But to the credit of Barbara Vann, who adapted the piece for the stage, her Medicine Show Theater Ensemble presents pure Joyce. If some of the tedium of the original comes through, so does the music of its language; and if the performance is uneven, it offers moments of beauty and insight, as when all the characters come under a veil that suddenly recasts itself as the sheet of Finnegan's bed as he, dreaming through an epic that seeks to explore human consciousness at night, begins to wake up (2:30). The Medicine Show Theater, 549 West 52nd Street, (212) 868-4444. Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sunday nights at 7. Tickets: $15.
ANNE MIDGETTE

'PLAY IN A PUB' It can be thrilling when one performance in an earthbound double bill about love and desire abruptly takes off, pulling the enterprise into the realm of feeling and belief. As a wry young Frenchwoman who chooses an ex-G.I. as her first lover, Kelli Holsopple persuades you that you are not in a restaurant bar in the East Village watching Romulus Linney's one-act play ''Can Can,'' but in France, with her. The evening opens with ''A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot,'' a revealing burlesque by Tennessee Williams about two lonely women of a certain age and their hunger for at least an encounter with the opposite sex, if not happiness. Phoenix Theater Ensemble's ''Play in a Pub'' runs through April 28 at the Bacchus Room, Bona Fides Restaurant, 60 Second Avenue, at Third Street, East Village, (212)352-3101. Sunday at 3 p.m.; Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 7 p.m. Tickets: $15 plus one drink minimum.
ANDREA STEVENS

Last Chance

+* 'DEMOCRACY' Michael Frayn's glorious study of the mutations of politics and the men who practice it, directed by Michael Blakemore, is one of those rare dramas that don't just dare to think big but that fully translate their high aspirations to the stage, with sharp style and thrilling clarity. The well-oiled, highly polished 10-actor ensemble is led by James Naughton and Richard Thomas. You're likely to find yourself echoing the sentiments of a government functionary caught up in the surge of tension and relief in a closely fought voting session. ''Never mind football!'' he exclaims. ''Try parliamentary democracy!'' (2:30). Brooks Atkinson Theater, 256 West 47th Street, (212)307-4100. Tonight at 8; tomorrow at 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets: $60 to $95.
BRANTLEY

+'HIDING BEHIND COMETS' The dynamics of the guy-walks-into-a-bar play are tricky. Inject a set of twins into the mix, as Brian Dykstra does in his play, and you've pretty much doomed the venture. The twins here are a male-female pair, 20-somethings named Troy (Robert Mollohan) and Honey (Moira MacDonald). They mind their father's dingy bar. The stranger who intrudes is Cole (Dan Moran), an elliptical older fellow with a temper. After much verbal sparring, and a lot of sex talk that isn't very sexy, the point emerges: Cole was supposedly at Jonestown during the mass suicide there in 1978, and he has dropped by the bar to force Honey and Troy to rethink their parentage. Mr. Dykstra's script sounds as if it's banking on the shock value of Jonestown, hoping that the audience, like the idiot twins on the stage, will not have heard of it. Way too early for that (1:45). 29th Street Rep, 212 West 29th Street, (212)868-4444. Tonight and tomorrow at 8 p.m.; tomorrow at 3. Tickets: $35; $40 for Fridays and Saturday evenings. Closes April 17.
NEIL GENZLINGER

'RADIUM' Alex S. DeFazio's unfocused drama operates on the ''now that I have your attention ...'' principle. The first scene is of two naked men simulating anal sex. One is the play's would-be hero, Alexis (as in Alex S., one presumes). The other, J., is the play's most interesting creation, a devastatingly good-looking guy whose favorite game is picking up men and then refusing to satisfy them sexually. ''I've never been rejected, not as I am,'' he says. Unfortunately, ''Radium'' isn't about J. The play does have an inventive Pinteresque structure, but basically Mr. DeFazio has written two acts of college-boy poetry about being gay, looking for emotional connections and feeling uncomfortable about it all (1:40). The Jewel Box Theater, at the 42nd Street Workshop Theater Company, 312 West 36th Street, (212)868-4444. Tonight and tomorrow and Sunday at 8 p.m. Tickets: $25, $15 for 65+ and students.
GATES

Movies

A selective listing by critics of The Times: New or noteworthy movies playing this weekend in the New York metropolitan region. * denotes a highly recommended film. Ratings and running times are in parentheses. Full reviews of all current releases, movie trailers, showtimes and tickets: nytimes.com/movies.

'BEAUTY SHOP' Directed by Billie Woodruff. Starring Queen Latifah, Alicia Silverstone, Kevin Bacon and Djimon Hounsou (PG-13, 105 minutes). Less a sequel than an old-fashioned sitcom spinoff, this loose and genial comedy moves the ''Barbershop'' franchise to Atlanta, and gives the ladies a turn at the warm, salty banter that made the first two installments so popular. Queen Latifa plays Gina, who quits her job at an upscale salon (run by Mr. Bacon's character) and opens her own establishment. Staffed by a group of boisterous women, along with a token male, the place soon becomes a neighborhood institution. Various subplots pop up now and then, but like its predecessors, this movie runs less on story than on the relaxed, playful humor that accompanies serious hair care.
A.O. SCOTT

'THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE' Written and directed by Rebecca Miller. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis (R, 112 minutes). The Jack of all trades in this new film, played by the brilliant actor Daniel Day-Lewis, is no ordinary man. A proud survivor of the 1960's and its utopian promise, Jack lives alone on an island with his only daughter, Rose (Camilla Belle). Shrunk to near-skeletal size, his bones poking right angles through his clothes, Jack suffers from two heart conditions. One will soon put him six feet under. But before that, the other may send the terminal outsider and his daughter down the path of disaster, though one shaped more by the tao of Oprah and Dr. Phil than the tragedy of Lear and Cordelia. A story about the limits of love, ''The Ballad of Jack and Rose'' is also about the limits of idealism as well as, rather unfortunately, those of its restlessly ambitious writer and director.
MANOHLA DARGIS

'GUESS WHO' Directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan. Starring Bernie Mac, Ashton Kutcher and Zoe Salda?PG-13, 103 minutes). This loose, pointless remake of ''Guess Who's Coming to Dinner'' at least suggests that American racial attitudes have relaxed since 1967, when Spencer Tracy worried about Sidney Poitier marrying his daughter. This time, the worried father is played by Mr. Mac, and the suitor by Mr. Kutcher. Mr. Mac plays Percy Jones, a truculent suburban patriarch deeply suspicious of Simon Green, the amiable, spazzy stockbroker played by Mr. Kutcher. He and Ms. Salda?who plays Percy's older daughter and Simon's fianc? is charming and attractive, but her role is quite secondary to what is at bottom an interracial buddy comedy. Or would be, if the squad of screenwriters had bothered to write any funny jokes.
SCOTT

* 'FEVER PITCH' Directed by Peter Farrelly and Bobby Farrelly. Starring Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon (PG-13, 98 minutes). To watch ''Fever Pitch,'' the new, thoroughly winning if not especially good romantic comedy by Peter and Bobby Farrelly, is to appreciate, yet again, that the great loves of our lives are rarely perfect. That is, of course, not big news. If Hollywood has taught us anything over the last century it is that every so often a seemingly ordinary commercial enterprise can afford us fleeting access to the sublime. And for my money, there are few movie moments right now more sublime than the image of Drew Barrymore running across a major league baseball field and, with that famous jaw jutting into the wind, dodging ballplayers and storybook clich?to save the windup of this imperfectly true romance. Based on the memoir by Nick Hornby, the film doesn't fully work, but I ended up rooting for it anyway, partly because Ms. Barrymore and her costar Jimmy Fallon make a nice fit, partly because the Farrellys bring so much heart to their movie.
DARGIS

'HOSTAGE' Directed by Florent Siri. Starring Bruce Willis and Kevin Pollak (R, 113 minutes). More than sad, it's slightly sickening to consider the technology, talent and know-how squandered on this pile of blood-soaked toxic waste dumped onto the screen in an attempt to salvage Mr. Willis's fading career as an action hero. The star plays a former hostage negotiator who has exiled himself to a quiet southern California town after a botched standoff. He springs back into action when the cliff-hugging mansion of a crooked book-cooking corporate accountant (Mr. Pollak) is simultaneously invaded by a posse of teenage punks and by a S.W.A.T. team of high-tech gangsters. The fiery demolition of this architectural monstrosity in which the accountant lives with his two children is the only thing worth applauding in this mess of film.
STEPHEN HOLDEN

'KUNG FU HUSTLE' Directed by Stephen Chow. Starring Mr. Chow (R, 95 minutes, in Mandarin and Cantonese, with English subtitles). Recent Chinese-language action epics like ''Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'' ane ''Hero'' have been somber, almost operatic, so it is nice that the prolific Mr. Chow has supplied the latest reminder that the martial arts tradition has plenty of room for clowning. This kinetic, exhausting, relentlessly entertaining film throws scraps of a half-century of international pop culture into a fast-whirling blender -- western, Looney Tunes, and several generations of Hong Kong chopsockery. Some old stars have been coaxed out of retirment, most notably Yuan Qiu, who plays a chain-smoking, leather-lunged Landlady -- imagine a combination of Lucille Ball, Thelma Ritter and the Tasmanian Devil -- and who upstages even the most extravagant computer-generated special effects. There is sure to be a sequel, but it's hardly necessary, since the concussive action sequences induce a kind of amnesia. You could watch this movie again and again, which is another way of saying that, in the end, it isn't very memorable.
SCOTT

* 'LOOK AT ME' Directed by Agn?Jaoui. Starring Marilou Berry, Ms. Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri (PG-13, 110 minutes; in French, with English subtitles). Ms. Jaoui follows her marvelous first feature, ''The Taste of Others,'' with an equally delicious comedy, as tart as it is sweet, of ambition, miscommunication and egoism. Set in a Paris that seems to be populated entirely by artists and writers (some of whom also have beautiful houses in the country), the film affectionately tweaks the bad manners and complacency of France's intellectual elite. Mr. Bacri plays a famous novelist whose cavalier neglect of his slightly overweight daughter (Ms. Berry) is the moral pivot on which the complex plot turns. Ms. Jaoui plays the young woman's voice teacher, who husband is an up-and-coming novelist and who is either the film's most honest character or its most thorough-going hypocrite.
SCOTT

'MELINDA AND MELINDA' Directed by Woody Allen. Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Will Ferrell, Radha Mitchell and Chloe Sevigny (PG-13, 99 minutes). The same story, more or less, told two different ways -- as serious drama and as comedy. Though the drama lacks emotional intensity and the comedy lacks funny jokes, Mr. Allen interweaves them deftly enough and provides some of the members of his large cast with opportunities to do some crisp, old-fashioned stage-style acting. The link between the two tales in Ms. Mitchell, who plays Melinda in both -- an unhappy woman who throws the romantic, professional and social lives of a group of articulate Manhattanites into mild turmoil. In the tragedy, she chain-smokes and fidgets, while in the comedy she has an ing?e's golden glow. Some of the actors fare better than others -- Ms. Sevigny and Mr. Ejiofor seem best suited for Mr. Allen's anti-naturalistic approach to acting, while Mr. Ferrell's shambling geniality make him a poor choice for the inevitable role of Woody Allen surrogate. In any case, the movie is most powerful as an extended piece of real estate pornography, depicting a seductive fantasy New York (though filmed in the real one) where struggling filmmakers and out-of-work actors live in fabulous lofts and labyrinthine prewar apartments.
SCOTT

* 'MILLIONS' Directed by Danny Boyle. Starring Alex Etel (PG, 97 minutes). When it comes to making movies, Mr. Boyle is usually up to no good, which is something this visual stylist does with great ostentatious flair. Best known for ''Trainspotting,'' a grungy entertainment about the gleefully down and out, and for the shiver-filled zombie flick ''28 Days Later,'' Mr. Boyle is the sort of creative type in whom the milk of human kindness often seems to curdle rather than flow. Given the gaudy violence that frequently moves his stories forward and keeps them jumping, it may come as something of a surprise that he has directed a heartfelt, emotionally delicate children's movie about life and death and all the parts in between. Pegged to a motherless child named Damian (Alex Etel, making a sensational debut), ''Millions'' is about the secret world of children, in particular that miraculous, tragically brief interlude when the young imagination -- not yet captive to crippling adult conventions like time, space and rational thought -- takes boundless flight.
DARGIS

'MISS CONGENIALITY 2: ARMED AND FABULOUS' Directed by John Pasquin. Starring Sandra Bullock (PG-13, 100 minutes). Wading through this junky sequel to her genial goofball hit ''Miss Congeniality,'' Ms. Bullock looks as if she would rather be shoveling pig waste, though of course in some respects that is exactly what she's doing. Set a mere three weeks after the first film, which was released in 2000, this sequel finds Ms. Bullock as the charmingly clumsy F.B.I. agent Gracie Hart, vainly fending off unwanted celebrity. On her last assignment, Gracie infiltrated a beauty pageant by metamorphosing from duckling to swan, a mission that earned her legions of fans across the country. After her cover is blown during a bank heist, endangering her and the other agents on her team, the powers that be decide that she should become ''the face of the F.B.I.,'' the idea being that flouncing about in designer threads will be better for Gracie's soul and career and, by extension, this movie than pushing pencils. It isn't.
DARGIS

'THE PACIFIER' Directed by Adam Shankman. Starring Vin Diesel (PG, 97 minutes). In the primary visual gag of ''The Pacifier,'' a Navy Seal, on a top-secret babysitting mission, retrofits his gun and grenade holders to keep baby formula and diapers at the ready. Despite the specter of boogeymen, Disney's new family flick remains chipper and occasionally clever, as it sends up the high-tech know-how required in 21st-century parenting. As a special-ops warrior with a heart-thawing assignment, Mr. Diesel succeeds as a genre-switcher through the help of an able ensemble. The mayhem should delight kids, just as the imposed order will please parents. Anyone else, however, might feel as though they are, in Mr. Diesel's words, merely ''burning daylight.''
NED MARTEL

'THE RING TWO' Directed by Hideo Nakata. Starring Naomi Watts (PG-13, 111 minutes). It was only a matter of time before the Japanese horror auteur Hideo Nakata went Hollywood and so he has at last as the director of, yes, ''The Ring Two,'' the inevitable sequel to the American remake of his original hit. (Got that?) Once again, Ms. Watts plays Rachel Keller, a journalist and a single mom to a young son, Aidan (David Dorfman), recently relocated from Seattle to a small coastal town in Oregon. In ''The Ring,'' Rachel escaped the marauding ghost in the machine and now thinks she has entered a new chapter. No such luck; she is actually mucking about on a slag heap of recycled scares, dumb lines and predictable entanglements, including some static with a potential boyfriend replacement (Simon Baker) and some weirdness with an asylum inmate (Sissy Spacek in a fright wig). Once again, blood pools, water flows and the ghost comes calling through the magic of video, scaring to death anyone foolish enough not to have made the move to DVD.
DARGIS

'ROBOTS' Directed by Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldanha. With the voices of Ewan McGregor, Halle Berry and Robin Williams (PG, 89 minutes). Like so many other non-Pixar computer-animated family movies, this one, from Fox's Blue Sky Studios, runs on visual novelty and narrative familiarity. The setting, a world made entirely for and by clanky mechanical gizmos, is rendered with impressive skill and imagination, as are the characters, an assortment of dented heroes and sleek, silvery villains. Otherwise, it's the usual junkyard assemblage of celebrity voices, lame pop-cultural allusions, cool soundtrack music and heartwarming lessons about being yourself and following your dreams. There is, it must be said, a certain honesty to the story, which suggests that recycled, second-hand junk is superior to the latest high-tech upgrades, a moral the movie at once upholds and refutes.
SCOTT

'SAHARA' Directed by Breck Eisner. Starring Matthew McConaughey, Steve Zahn, Penelope Cruz, Lambert Wilson, Glynn Turman, Delroy Lindo, William H. Macy and Rainn Wilson. (PG-13, 130 minutes). It may not be ''Raiders of the Lost Ark,'' but ''Sahara,'' the screen adaptation of Clive Cussler's sprawling African adventure yarn, is a movie that keeps half a brain in its head while adopting the amused, cocky smirk of the Indiana Jones romps. A fusion of old and new, it both is and isn't a delirious escape into adventure-serial heaven. Amid its madcap derring-do, the movie inserts clear, simple alarms about environmental protection, African despotism, global interdependence, and bureaucratic cowardice. Its dressing up of an old-fashioned adventure fantasy in contemporary threads is an experiment in juxtaposition that gains in assurance as the film bounds along. As the swashbuckling comic hero Dirk Pitt, Mr. McConaughey at last gets a clear shot at stepping into Harrison Ford's $20 million trekking shoes, but those shoes may not fit.
HOLDEN

* 'SCHIZO' Directed by Guka Omarova. Starring Olzhas Nusuppaev. (not rated, 86 minutes, in Russian, with English subtitles). This modest neo-realist film from Kazhakstan is both tough and tender, and it illuminates the lives of its characters with bracing clarity and understated empathy. Schizo is a teen-aged boy living with his mother and her boyfriend in a desolate area of vast fields and ababandoned industry. After helping his would-be stepfather recruit fighters for illegal bare-knuckle boxing matches, Schizo gets involved with Zinka, a local woman whose husband has died in the ring after a brutal bout. Their friendship is sweet and a little improbable, but as the movie follows the conventions of a crime-tinged coming-of-age story it achieves a rough, convincing poetry made of the hard circumstances of real life.
SCOTT

'SIN CITY' Directed by Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez. Starring Benicio Del Toro, Clive Owen and Bruce Willis (R, 126 minutes). There are eight million stories in the naked city and almost as many crammed into ''Sin City.'' Based on the comic book series of the same name by Mr. Miller, this slavishly faithful screen adaptation tracks the ups and downs of tough guys and dolls recycled from the lower depths and bottom shelves of pulp fiction. Instead of Raymond Chandler, though, these hard-boiled tales owe a debt to the American primitivism of Mickey Spillane and comic book legends like William Gaines. ''Sin City'' has been made with such scrupulous care and obvious love for its genre influences that it's a shame the movie is kind of a bore. In recent years, Mr. Rodriguez has been a careless craftsman, but he went to great lengths to honor Mr. Miller's vision. Alas, in an effort to make a faithful adaptation, Mr. Rodriguez put his own movie sense on hold, not even bothering with a real script.
DARGIS

'THE UPSIDE OF ANGER' Directed by Mike Binder. Starring Joan Allen, Kevin Costner, Erika Christensen, Evan Rachel Wood, Keri Russell and Alicia Witt (R, 116 minutes). The upside of this deeply flawed attempt to marry midlife romantic comedy with domestic farce is that it provides a platform for Mr. Costner and Ms. Allen to do some marvelous work. Both performances are somewhat familiar: Mr. Costner, once again, is an athlete past his prime, and Ms. Allen is a brittle, unhappy suburban housewife, but the actors slip into their characters with ease and wit, and complement each other beautifully as they explore a haphazard friendship that turns into a love affair. The downside is that Mr. Binder does not give them enough of a dramatic context to work in, and undermines their efforts with a surprise ending that very nearly destroys the whole movie. Ms. Witt, Ms. Christensen, Ms. Wood and Ms. Russell play Ms. Allen's daughters, but their characters are as thinly conceived as figures in a television pilot, and it is hard to believe that the four of them and Ms. Allen add up to a family.
SCOTT

Pop

A selective listing by critics of The Times: New or noteworthy rock and pop concerts in the New York metropolitan region this weekend. * denotes a highly recommended concert. Full reviews of recent concerts: nytimes.com/music.

THE BRAVERY, Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey Street, near the Bowery, Lower East Side, (212)533-2111. This cheerfully ridiculous neo-wave band comes armed with plenty of pseudo-disco basslines and gobs of eye makeup. This combination has earned the band a bunch of fans and perhaps an even bigger (or, at any rate, more vocal) bunch of detractors, including the lead singer of another neo-wave band, the Killers. For entertainment's sake, here's hoping some detractors sneak in among the fans during this concert -- rock bands don't get booed often enough. Sunday night at 8, with Ash and alaska!; tickets -- $16 in advance, $18 at the door -- are sold out, but returns may be available.
KELEFA SANNEH

T BROUSSARD AND THE ZYDECO STEPPERS, Satalla, 37 West 26th Street, (212) 576-1155. Bryant (T) Broussard has Lousiana musicians on both sides of his family. He's the accordionist and singer of a hard-working zydeco band. This show on Sunday, presented by Let's Zydeco, starts with dance lessons at 1:30 followed by the band from 2:30 to 6; admission is $18.
JON PARELES

DAMON AND NAOMI, the Knitting Factory, 74 Leonard Street, TriBeCa, (212)219-3006. Damon and Naomi used to be in Galaxie 500, and on their own they have held onto the old group's hushed tone and searching simplicity; their group includes Kurihara from the Japanese band Ghost. Sunday night at 7, with Adrian Crowley and the writer Rick Moody, doing a reading, opening. Admission is $12.
PARELES

DJ LE SPAM AND THE SPAM ALLSTARS, S.O.B.'s (Sounds of Brazil), 204 Varick Street, at Houston Street, South Village, (212)243-4940. This party imported from Miami puts a disc jockey together with live musicians, mixing Latin rhythms with electronic beats. Tomorrow night, midnight to dawn; admission is $10.
PARELES

OSCAR D'LEON, Copacabana, 560 West 34th Street (212) 239-2672. Oscar D'Leon, a suavely forceful singer and a bass-twirling bandleader from Venezuela, leads a high-powered dance band that holds on to the best aspects of 1970's and 1980's salsa. Tomorrow night at 10 p.m., trading sets with Raffy Matias; admission is $25. PARELES C. GIBBS, Rodeo Bar, 375 Third Avenue at 27th Street, (212)683-6500. Christian Gibbs, who played lead guitar for Modern English and Foetus before starting his own bands, never settles down. As his lyrics detail surreal and troubled visions, with titles like ''Oversized Pin Cushion'' and ''Superficial Flesh Wound,'' the music wanders amid countryish rock, cracked cabaret oom-pah and elaborate, Beatles-flavored ballads. Tonight's first set starts at 10; free.
PARELES

CHARLIE GRACIE, Rodeo Bar, 375 Third Avenue at 27th Street, (212)683-6500. In 1957, Charlie Gracie was a rockabilly singer from Philadelphia whose hit, ''Butterfly,'' topped Elvis Presley on the charts. Years later, he still works his guitar hard. Tomorrow night's first set is at 10; free.
PARELES

THE KLEZMATICS, Satalla, 37 West 26th Street, (212)576-1155. The Klezmatics love the laughing, moaning melodies of traditional klezmer music. They also love jazz, rock and downtown improvisation, and they bring all of them to bear on their music, which can be raucous, hypnotic, reverent and dizzying, sometimes all in one quick-changing piece. They carry klezmer's itinerant, idea-gathering spirit all the way into present-day New York City. Tomorrow night at 7:30 and 10; tickets are $25 in advance, $30 at the door.
PARELES

MOFRO/CYRO BAPTISTA AND BEAT THE DONKEY, Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey Street, near the Bowery, Lower East Side, (212)533-2111. Mofro, a pair of guitarists from Florida, play bluesy songs that revel in swampy roots. Cyro Baptista, a Brazilian percussionist who's fond of melody and humor as well as rhythm, leads a troupe of percussionists and dancers in Beat the Donkey, his 10-member mini-carnival, playing instruments and rhythms that are both traditional and newly concocted. Tomorrow night at 9; tickets are $15 in advance, $18 at the door.
PARELES

* NELLY , the Theater at Madison Square Garden, 7th Avenue at 32nd Street, (212)465-6741. Still counting the money from his ambitious and charming recent pair of albums, ''Sweat'' and ''Suit'' (Universal), Nelly comes to town to celebrate his continuing success -- and, perhaps, his neat feat of making a video (''Over and Over,'' with the country star Tim McGraw) that plays on both BET and CMT. He is to be joined by a strong line-up of rappers: the energetic heavyweight Fat Joe and, best of all, the slick but ferocious Atlanta kingpin T.I. Tonight at 8, tickets are $45.50 to $75.50.
SANNEH

NINA NASTASIA, Tonic, 107 Norfolk Street, near Delancey Street, Lower East Side, (212)358-7503. In her clear voice, Nina Nastasia sings visions of desolation and unflinching love -- ''dirty hands and dirty feet and all'' -- with melodies that can hint at the symmetries of Appalachian music and a homespun backup from instruments like accordion and banjo. Tomorrow night at 8, with Richard Milner opening; tickets are $12.
PARELES

OF MONTREAL, Northsix, 66 North 6th Street, Williamburg, Brooklyn, (718)599-5103. Of Montreal, which emerged with the Elephant Six collective of neo-psychedelic bands in Athens, Ga., plays giddy, optimistic, harmonically rambling songs by Kevin Barnes, who's clearly a Beach Boys and Beatles fan. Tomorrow night at 9 with St. Thomas and the Bluffs opening; admission is $10.
PARELES

* ONEIDA, the Knitting Factory, 74 Leonard Street, TriBeCa, (212)219-3006. Oneida, a New York band, leans hard on the keyboard-driven minimal rock of the early 1980's for songs that are joyfully relentless. It revs up frantic, obsessive patterns to carry thoughts about history, sex, drugs, rock and roll and a dystopian future, with a drive that's both obsessive and ecstatic. Tomorrow night at 11:30, with Magnolia Electric Co. and Oakley Hall opening; tickets are $10 in advance, $12 tomorrow.
PARELES

* THE SCUMFROG, the Sullivan Room, 218 Sullivan Street, near Bleecker Street, Greenwich Village, (212)252-2151. This party celebrates the three year anniversary of this cozy dance club. The headliner is the Scumfrog, a house producer and D.J. who pays tribute to disco in his own weird way, emphasizing dirty synthesizer lines and tinny vocals; the result is an appealing, free-floating sleaziness. Tonight at 10, with Alex Pearce, Kind Nick and 3 Speaker High; admission is $15.
SANNEH

SPANISH HARLEM ORCHESTRA, Town Hall, 123 West 43rd Street, (212)840-2824 or (212)545-7536. Anyone who's heard a salsa band in New York City has probably seen some of the members of the Spanish Harlem Orchestra: They're the virtuosic journeymen who are one of New York City's great musical resources. As the Spanish Harlem Orchestra, they reclaim salsa classics under the direction of the keyboardist Oscar Hernandez, who has worked with Ruben Blades and Paul Simon. Tonight at 8; tickets are $30 and $35.
PARELES

ROD STEWART, Continental Airlines Arena, the Meadowlands, Route 120, East Rutherford, N.J., (201)935-3900. The soulful scratch in Rod Stewart's voice has carried him through boozy rock, rootsy coming-of-age tales, nostalgic rock and, lately, standards. He's unafraid to be a self-parody as long as it pleases the crowds. Tonight at 8; tickets are $37.50 to $95.
PARELES

* JESSE SYKES AND THE SWEET HEREAFTER, Mercury Lounge, 217 East Houston Street, at Ludlow Street, Lower East Side, (212) 260-4700. A cold wind seems to blow through Jesse Sykes' voice as her songs face desolation and mortality, while her band, the Sweet Hereafter, plays in poised slow motion. There's country in the music, with brushes on the drums and pedal-steel guitar wafting in from above; there's also a sighing viola and a touch of surf-guitar reverb. It's spellbound music, rapt in fatalism and sorrow. Tomorrow night at 11, with Great Lake Swimmers at 10, the M's at 9 and Jennifer O'Connor at 8; admission is $12.
PARELES

* DANNY TENAGLIA, Spirit, 530 W. 27th Street, near 10th Avenue, Chelsea, (212)268-9477. Mr. Tenaglia is one of the city's greatest and most reliable -- and most relentless -- dance music D.J.'s. At this party celebrating, um, a party he threw a year ago, expect a long, delirious night: Mr. Tenaglia is beloved not only for his catholic approach to house music (from clattering rhythm-only tracks to sleek electronic confections), but for his extraordinary stamina, too. Tonight at 11; tickets are $30 in advance, $40 at the door.
SANNEH

PAUL VAN DYK, Crobar, 530 West 28th Street, near 10th Avenue, Chelsea, (212)629-9000. When this wildly popular German progressive-house producer and D.J. comes to town, you can expect a precise set full of the usual dancefloor-pleasing devices: heroic synthesizer lines, sudden (or gradual) volume changes and lots of wooshing sounds. Tonight after 10; tickets are $40 in advance, $50 at the door.
SANNEH

Cabaret

A selective listing by critics of The Times: New or noteworthy cabaret shows in Manhattan this weekend. * denotes a highly recommended show. Full reviews of recent cabaret shows: nytimes.com/music.

BARBARA CARROLL, Oak Room, Algonquin Hotel, 59 West 44th Street, (212)419-9331. The Lady of a Thousand Songs is back in the Oak Room for Sunday brunch and evening performances. This elegant red-headed musician and singer is a poised entertainer whose impeccable pianism belongs to the school of jazz that maintains a sense of classical decorum at the keyboard. Even when swinging out, she remains an impressionist with special affinities for Thelonious Monk and bossa nova. Vocally, she belongs to the conversational tradition of Mabel Mercer, with a style that's blas?ut never cold. Sunday at 2 and 8 p.m. cover: $55 at 2, including brunch at noon; $42 at 8, with a $15 minimum. (An $80 dinner-and-show package is available.)
STEPHEN HOLDEN

* BLOSSOM DEARIE, Danny's Skylight Room, 346 West 46th Street, Clinton, (212)265-8133. To watch this singer and pianist is to appreciate the power of a carefully deployed pop-jazz minimalism combined with a highly discriminating taste in songs. She remains the definitive interpreter, at once fey and tough, of the pop-jazz satirist Dave Frishberg, as astute and unforgiving a social critic as exists. The songs -- her own and other people's -- date from all periods of a career remarkable for its longevity and for Ms. Dearie's stubborn independence and sly wit, which have never gone stale. Tomorrow night at 7; Sunday night at 6:15. Cover: $25, with a $15 minimum; a $54.50 dinner-and-show package is available.
HOLDEN

* DEE DEE BRIDGEWATER, Le Jazz au Bar, 41 East 58th Street, (212)308-9455. This singer's brilliant but exhausting two-hour show, ''J'ai Deux Amours,'' makes a compelling case that every American performer would profit by taking an extended sabbatical in Paris. That's where Ms. Bridgewater has lived for the last two decades. Her expatriate perspective encouraged the one-time rhythm-and-blues singer from Flint, Mich., to refine the far-flung musical vocabulary that infuses this bilingual program of mostly familiar, mostly French-originated pop songs. Tonight and tomorrow night at 7:30 and 9:30 (tickets: $65), and Sunday at 7:30 (tickets: $50); all shows have a two-drink minimum.
HOLDEN

Jazz

A selective listing by critics of The Times: New or noteworthy jazz concerts in the New York metropolitan region this weekend. * denotes a highly recommended concert. Full reviews of recent jazz concerts: nytimes.com/music.

KENNY BARRON SEXTET, Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola, Frederick P. Rose Hall, 60th Street and Broadway, Manhattan, (212) 258-9595; www.jalc.org. Mr. Barron, the pianist who has been a widespread presence in jazz over the last three decades, seeks out collaborators of various generations and styles and works energetically on the bandstand. This band includes Vincent Herring, Dayna Stephens, Eddie Henderson, Kiyoshi Kitigawa, and Victor Lewis. Sets through Sunday night are at 7:30 and 9:30, with an 11:30 set tonight and tomorrow; cover charge is $30, plus a $5 minimum at the bar, $10 at the tables.
BEN RATLIFF

* GEORGE CABLES PROJECT, Smoke, 2751 Broadway at 106th Street, Manhattan, (212)864-6662. With quiet intensity, Mr. Cables solidified his reputation as one of the best mainstream-jazz pianists during the 1970s; he doesn't lead bands in New York that often, so this is a chance to see him with a particularly good one, including the saxophonist Gary Bartz, bassist Eric Revis and drummer Jeff Watts. Sets are tonight and tomorrow at 9, 11 and 12:30; cover charge is $25.
RATLIFF

EDMAR CASTANEDA SEXTET, Sweet Rhythm, 88 Seventh Avenue South, at Bleecker Street, West Village, (212)255-3626. A young Colombian musician, Mr. Castaneda plays the harp, which has, obviously, rarely been used in jazz; but once you see his percussive technique you might wonder why this is so. Sets are Sunday at 8 and 10; cover charge is $15, and there is a $10 minimum.
RATLIFF

BILL CHARLAP TRIO, Village Vanguard, 178 Seventh Avenue South, at 11th Street, West Village, (212)255-4037. For about eight years, the pianist Mr. Charlap has had a steady trio with the bassist Peter Washington and the drummer Kenny Washington; his performances have become extraordinary displays of discipline and improvisation in the language of mainstream jazz -- the wonders of an organized, creative mind. Sets through Sunday night are at 9 and 11; cover charge is $30.
RATLIFF

CARLA COOK, Sweet Rhythm, 88 Seventh Avenue South, at Bleecker Street, West Village, (212)255-3626. A soulful singer who reaches outside jazz into pop and gospel to get what she needs; usually she has an excellent jazz group backing her up. Sets are tonight and tomorrow at 8, 10 and midnight; cover charge is $20 and there is a $10 minimum.
RATLIFF

ELI DEGIBRI QUARTET, Smalls, 183 West 10th Street, West Village, (212)929-7565. A young tenor saxophonist from Israel, Mr. Degibri is starting to be known in New York; he commanded some attention when he toured with Herbie Hancock several years ago. Don't miss him. He is a very modern improviser, super-artful; his creations are spiky and fractured, but immaculately sculptured. With Ben Monder on guitar, Ben Street on bass, and Bill Stewart (today) or Adam Cruz (tomorrow) on drums. Shows begin at 10 p.m. Cover, $10 and there is a two-drink minimum.
RATLIFF

MARK FELDMAN-SYLVIE COURVOISIER/IKUE MORI, The Stone, Avenue C and 2nd Street, East Village, www.thestonenyc.com. Tonight at 8, the violinist Mr. Feldman and pianist Ms. Courvoisier play the music of John Zorn; at 10, Ikue Mori plays a solo show involving laptop computers and percussive electronics. Admission is $10.
RATLIFF

SHELLEY HIRSCH-ANTHONY COLEMAN/ELLIOTT SHARP ORCHESTRA CARBON CONDUCTED BY BUTCH MORRIS, The Stone, Avenue C and 2nd Street, East Village, www.thestonenyc.com. Tomorrow at 8, the vocalist Ms. Hirsch and the pianist Anthony Coleman play a program called ''In and Around Kurt Weill''; at 10, Mr. Sharp's 13-piece band, as well as the conductor Butch Morris, crams into the new club's little stage area to perform a piece called ''Quarks Swim Free.'' Admission is $10 per set.
RATLIFF

* DAVE HOLLAND BIG BAND, Birdland, 315 West 44th Street, midtown, (212) 581-3080. This big band is a relatively new 12-piece outgrowth of the bassist Mr. Holland's more widely known quintet. With the frighteningly well calibrated quintet, you know what you're going to get: careful compositions based on ostinatos, odd metered funk and counterpoint. The big band does more. Loud and fairly traditional, its arrangements for booming horn sections mix influences from postwar Count Basie and Duke Ellington, as well as Thad Jones; it's also music of a different temperature and mood, accommodating more slow tempos, along with some old-fashioned, take-your-time, knock-it-out-of-the-park solos. Sets are tonight and tomorrow at 9 and 11; cover charge is $40, minimum, $10 .
RATLIFF

* JAZZ COMPOSERS COLLECTIVE FESTIVAL, Jazz Standard, 116 East 27th Street, Manhattan, (212)576-2232. A worthy cooperative organization that has produced many concerts and brought forth a lot of good jazz records, the collective deserves your attention because of its tacit insistence on merging different approaches to playing and thinking about jazz -- as well as resurrecting old figures like Herbie Nichols and Lucky Thompson. Tonight, the pianist Frank Kimbrough's Trio, and the Herbie Nichols Project; tomorrow, Ben Allison's New Quartet, and a new band, the Lucky Thompson Project; Sunday, saxophonist Michael Blake's quartet. Sets through Sunday night are at 7:30 and 9:30, with an 11:30 set tonight and tomorrow; cover charge is $25 and $20 on Sunday.
RATLIFF

* 'JAZZ CUBANO REUNION' Jazz Gallery, 290 Hudson Street, South Village, (212)242-1063. The two young Cuban musicians Yosvany Terry (saxophones) and Dafnis Prieto (drums) get together with a few other mid-90's arrivals to New York's new Latin music scene -- the pianist Luis Perdomo and the bassist Alex Hernandez. Tonight and tomorrow at 9 and 10:30; admission is $15 per set.
RATLIFF

* KATE McGARRY QUINTET, Joe's Pub, 425 Lafayette Street, East Village, (212)539-8770. A lot of jazz singers are good at a few devices and punch them out song after song; Ms. McGarry, who is slowly becoming known around New York, has a deeper supply. You'll find shades of pop singers like Suzanne Vega and Rickie Lee Jones in her voice; you'll also find some of the highest refinements of great jazz singing. She has a breadth of material that runs from jazz standards to traditional Irish ballads to a version of the Kinks' ''(So) Tired of Waiting for You.'' Her new record is ''Mercy Street'' (Palmetto), and she'll be playing new material, with the pianist Fred Hersch as guest. Tonight at 7:30; cover charge is $15.
RATLIFF

* NEW ORLEANS JAZZ ORCHESTRA, DIRECTED BY IRVIN MAYFIELD, Allen Room, Frederick P. Rose Hall, Broadway at 60th Street, Manhattan, (212)721-6500. A 17-piece band from New Orleans led by the young, dynamic trumpeter Irvin Mayfield, who spends part of the year playing party music of the New World with Los Hombres Calientes and part of the year composing his own music, including the Wynton Marsalis-influenced suite ''Strange Fruit,'' just released on Basin Street records. Tonight and tomorrow night at 7:30; remaining tickets are $100.
RATLIFF

TRIBUTE TO FRANK SINATRA, Blue Note, 131 West Third Street, West Village, (212)475-8592. A jazz musicians' gathering to honor the Voice, with contributions from the incomparable pianist Hank Jones, as well as Jim DiJulio, Mark Taylor, Eddie Bert, and others. Sets through Sunday are at 8 and 10:30; cover charge is $30, minimum, $5.
RATLIFF

Classical

A selective listing by critics of The Times: New or noteworthy opera and classical music events this weekend in the New York metropolitan region. * denotes a highly recommended event. Full reviews of recent music performances: nytimes.com/music.

Opera

'CARMEN' Straightforward and streamlined, nipped and tucked to bring it in at three hours, City Opera's production of Bizet's classic seems livelier than it last did. Katharine Goeldner is a fine singer, and if the production didn't help her get far past your standard-issue Gypsy mannerisms, that was fine too. John Bellemer, a good-looking tenor with a soft-grained voice that sometimes hardens under strain, is singing his first performances with the company as a callow Don Jos?also new is Malcolm MacKenzie, an appropriately burly Escamillo. Gary Thor Wedow conducts, adequately. Sunday afternoon at 1:30, New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, (212)870-5570. Remaining tickets: $32 to $65.
ANNE MIDGETTE

'DON GIOVANNI' The Metropolitan Opera's successful revival of its year-old production of ''Don Giovanni'' is playing again tomorrow night. The company has assembled a gang of good Mozarteans though not always ones bearing big names. Gerald Finley and Tamar Iveri are very good as the Don and Donna Anna. Samuel Ramey takes the unaccustomed role of Leporello and does well with it. Michael Yeargan's sets are simple and to the point. Philippe Jordan is the bright young Swiss conductor. Tomorrow at 8:30 p.m., Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, (212)362-6000. Remaining tickets: $215.
BERNARD HOLLAND

'MADAMA BUTTERFLY' The essentials of Puccini's opera are well-served in Mark Lamos's spare, attractive production, in which a magnified and uncluttered version of a traditional Japanese house fills the stage. A new cast joins the production tomorrow. The cast includes Marc Heller as Pinkerton, Jee Hyun Lin as Butterfly, Michael Corvino as Sharpless and Kathryn Friest as Suzuki. Atsushi Yamada conducts. Tonight at 8, New York City Opera, New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, (212)870-5570. Tickets: $37 to $105.
ALLAN KOZINN

'LES P?HEURS DE PERLES' With Zandra Rhodes's vividly colored sets and faux-native costumes, New York City Opera's new production of Bizet's early, pretty and slightly sluggish opera set in ancient Sri Lanka evokes the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. Mary Dunleavy, the Le?, has a lovely clear soprano; Yeghishe Manucharyan, as Nadir, a small, pushed, but reasonably fluid tenor; and Emmanuel Plasson captures the languorous sensuality of the lovely music. Still, it's an opera in which not much happens, but takes a long time to do it. Tomorrow afternoon at 1:30, New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, (212)870-5570. Sold out, but returns may be available.
MIDGETTE

TOSCA. The young Italian tenor Salvatore Licitra made a last-minute debut at the Metropolitan Opera in May of 2002, substituting for Luciano Pavarotti in Puccini's ''Tosca'' on what was assumed (incorrectly, it turned out) would be Mr. Pavarotti's farewell to the Met. On that night, Mr. Licitra, who was 33 at the time, seemed an immensely gifted tenor with an exciting but raw and unfinished voice. He is back at the Met for the first time since his dramatic debut, again as Cavaradossi in ''Tosca.'' Unfortunately, as an artist and singer he remains a work in progress. He still boasts a dusky-toned and powerful voice and sings with youthful energy and fervor. But he was vocally cautious on the first night of the Met's revival of Franco Zeffirelli's 1985 production and his phrasing was sometimes labored. His Tosca, the veteran soprano Maria Guleghina, as is her way, sacrifices beauty of sound and lyrical elegance for the sake of hard-edged power and dramatic intensity. The veteran baritone Frederick Burchinal takes over the role of Scarpia. James Conlon conducts. Tonight at 8 p.m., Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, (212)362-6000. Remaining tickets: $200.
ANTHONY TOMMASINI

Classical Music

AMERICAN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA In addition to championing forgotten composers, Leon Botstein and his orchestra have often presented fascinating but neglected music by figures we know well. Such is the case for this season-concluding program devoted to Richard Strauss's choral music, little known by even ardent Strauss admirers. Mr. Botstein will lead the orchestra and the Concert Chorale of New York in, among other works, ''Wanderers Sturmlied,'' ''Die Tageszeiten,'' and the ''Olympische Hymne,'' which Strauss conducted at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Sunday at 3, Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, (212)721-6500. Tickets: $25 to $53.
JEREMY EICHLER

ARTEK This early music ensemble is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, but it has changed greatly since its early days as a forum for Baroque keyboard works. Now its focus is more general, with vocal music -- especially vocal music that lends itself to dramatic presentation -- as a particular specialty. Even so, for old time's sake, the program tomorrow evening includes concertos for two harpsichords by J.S. Bach and two of his sons, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, and Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach. Gwendolyn Toth and Dongsok Shin are the harpsichord soloists, and the accompanying period instrument ensemble is to be conducted by Robert Mealy. The program also includes selections from J.S. Bach's Cantata No. 51 and an arrangement of Boccherini's ''Fandango,'' complete with castanets. Tomorrow at 8 p.m., St. Michael's Church, Amsterdam Avenue at 99th Street, (212)967-9157. Tickets: $20.
KOZINN

BROOKLYN PHILHARMONIC They're calling it ''Brooklyn's Ode to Joy:'' the ever-struggling, ever-scrappy Brooklyn Phil is offering Beethoven's Ninth along with a new work the orchestra has commissioned, Jennifer Higdon's ''Dooryard Bloom,'' based on poems by a Brooklyn boy, Walt Whitman. The soloist in this first-ever performance of Ms. Higdon's piece is Nmon Ford; Michael Christie will conduct. Tomorrow night at 8, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Fort Greene, (718)636-4100. Tickets: $20 to $60.
MIDGETTE

SARA DAVIS BUECHNER Besides being a nimble and elegant pianist, Sara Davis Buechner has a wide-ranging interest in overlooked repertory. Her Koch International recording of piano works by the operetta composer Rudolf Friml was an unexpected pleasure of 2003. So it's no surprise that the recital program she will play at the Greenwich House Music School tonight is rich with intriguing and little-known fare. After beginning with Mozart's Fantasy and Sonata in C minor, she offers works by Elliot Weisgarber, Yukiko Nishimura and Joaquin Turina. On Sunday afternoon she presents a master class at the school, open to the public. Recital tonight at 8; master class Sunday at 3 p.m.; Greenwich House Music School, 46 Barrow Street, West Village, (212)242-4770. Tickets: $15, $10 for students for the recital; $7 for the master class.
TOMMASINI

CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER For its final program of the season, the Chamber Music Society offers the premiere of Lalo Schifrin's ''Letters From Argentina.'' The instrumentation (double bass and bandone?oining a more typical chamber ensemble) and the composer's own description suggest an autobiographical work inspired by the aural memories of his Buenos Aires childhood, including tango and folk music. Sunday at 5 p.m., Tuesday at 7:30, Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, (212)875-5788. Tickets: $27.50 to $48.
EICHLER

DAPONTE STRING QUARTET David Del Tredici has written operas and orchestral works and won a Pulitzer Prize, but until recently he had never written a string quartet. The impetus for changing that was the DaPonte Quartet, four Juilliard- and Peabody-trained players who went to Maine in the 1990's on a rural residency grant from Chamber Music America and ended up settling down there. ''Settling'' doesn't preclude ''concertizing,'' and the quartet, which has played around the country, is making its New York debut tonight with pieces by Schulhoff and Beethoven, as well as Mr. Del Tredici's Quartet No. 1 in its New York premiere. Tonight at 8, Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall, (212)247-7800. Tickets: $30.
MIDGETTE

ENSEMBLE WIEN-BERLIN Compared to all those quartets and piano trios, woodwind chamber music seldom gets much time in the spotlight, but at least for this weekend the Ensemble Wien-Berlin will redress the imbalance. Consisting mainly of principal wind players (current and former) from the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics, the group offers a ''Czech Winds Weekend'' with works by Dvorak, Janacek, Martinu, Pavel Haas and others spread over two programs. Tomorrow night at 8 and Sunday at 3 p.m., 92nd Street Y, (212)415-5500. Tickets: $35.
EICHLER

FESTIVAL OF INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION WINNERS Big competition victories no longer guarantee professional success or even much exposure. The Metropolitan Museum is therefore trying to reward selected winners by presenting them in recital, in several cases for the first time in this country. The five remaining programs in this series will take place throughout the weekend: Severin von Eckardstein plays tonight at 8; Boris Giltburg is tomorrow at 3 p.m.; Alexei Grynyuk plays tomorrow night at 8; Giuseppe Albanese is Sunday at 3 p.m.; and Antti Siirala closes the festival Sunday night at 8. Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, Metropolitan Museum of Art, (212)570-3949. Tickets: $20 each, or $80 for all concerts.
EICHLER

FELICITY LOTT AND ANGELIKA KIRCHSCHLAGER Schumann's song cycle ''Frauenliebe und -leben,'' settings of poems by the German Romantic poet Adelbert von Chamisso that deal with the lives and loves of women, is a landmark of the song repertory that is probably performed too often for its own good. But the soprano Felicity Lott and the mezzo-soprano Angelika Kirchschlager have found what looks to be a fresh way to present that work in context with other songs dealing with themes of a woman's life from girlhood to old age. The less familiar setting of the Chamisso poems by Karl Loewe will also be performed, along with songs by Brahms and Mendelssohn, all dealing with themes of women. Graham Johnson is the pianist. Sunday at 2 p.m., Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, (212)721-6500. Tickets: $48.
TOMMASINI

VIKTORIA MULLOVA This Russian violinist won the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1982, but earned bigger headlines when she defected to the West not long afterward. She is an energetic, focused player who some listeners find chilly and others virtuosic and precise. But her partner in this recital is the French pianist Katia Lab?e, a firebrand (and sometime jazz pianist), and it's hard to imagine Ms. Lab?e signing on for a performance that threatens to be icy. The repertory includes a couple of novelties -- Clara Schumann's Romance in D flat and a work by an English composer, Dave Maric -- along with Stravinsky's ''Suite Italienne,'' Schubert's Fantasy in C (D. 934) and the Ravel Violin Sonata. Tonight at 8, Carnegie Hall, (212)247-7800. Tickets: $23 to $74.
KOZINN

NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC Riccardo Muti, who usually can't get enough of his homeland, must be relieved to get away from Italy for the moment, after the travails leading up to his resignation as music director of the Teatro Alla Scala in Milan on April 2. New Yorkers have taken a special interest in the fracas, since the Philharmonic, which courted Mr. Muti avidly but vainly before hiring Lorin Maazel, will, barring any further extension of Mr. Maazel's contract, soon be back in the market to replace him in 2009. Here Philharmonic audiences will get another look and listen at close hand, as Mr. Muti conducts Liszt's ''Faust Symphony'' and a work by Goffredo Petrassi. Tonight and tomorrow night at 8, Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, (212)721-6500. Tickets: $25 to $90.
JAMES R. OESTREICH

'SEPTETS AND OCTETS' This is the last in a series of concerts at the Miller Theater that has been pairing masterworks from the chamber music repertory with comparably great works from the 20th and 21st centuries. Tomorrow night's program presents Schubert's popular Octet in F with Schoenberg's inventive Septet Suite in E flat, Op. 29. The starry roster of performers, many of whom play regularly with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, includes, in part, the clarinetist Charles Neidich, the hornist William Purvis, the violinist Ida Kavafian, the cellist Fred Sherry and the pianist Christopher Oldfather. Tomorrow at 8 p.m., Miller Theater, Broadway at 116th Street, Morningside Heights, (212)854-7799. Tickets: $25.
TOMMASINI

ST. LOUIS SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA With his orchestra's labor problems in abeyance, David Robertson brings the St. Louis Symphony to Carnegie Hall. The talented Mr. Robertson is American and relatively young, and his program reflects both situations. The music of Ives begins and ends the evening with first ''The Unanswered Question'' and last the Second Symphony. In between come Copland's ''Lincoln Portrait'' with none other than Paul Newman as narrator and John Adams's ''Century Rolls.'' St. Louis seems eager to have Mr. Robertson, and it offers him an excellent place to learn the American orchestra business at his own pace. Sometimes the right people find each other at the right time. Tomorrow night at 8, Carnegie Hall, (212)247-7800. Tickets: $24 to $82.
HOLLAND

ANNE SOFIE VON OTTER You can not brand classical music as elitist when there are so many free or affordable concerts to take in all over New York, notably the ''Free for All at Town Hall'' series. On Sunday afternoon this essential series of free concerts presents the rich-voiced and intelligent mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter in a recital program with the pianist Bengt Forsberg, her longtime colleague. The program offers songs by Mozart, Haydn and Schubert as well as Haydn's solo cantata ''Arianna a Naxos.'' Interspersed among the vocal works Mr. Forsberg will play solo pieces by J.C. Bach and Schubert. Sunday at 5 p.m., Town Hall, 123 West 43rd Street, Manhattan, (212)707-8787. Tickets are available for free (two per person) at the Town Hall box office starting at noon.
TOMMASINI

Dance

A selective listing by critics of The Times: New or noteworthy dance events this weekend in the New York metropolitan region. * denotes a highly recommended event. Full reviews of recent performances: nytimes.com/dance.

* LES BALLETS GRANDIVA These winsome male ballerinas will perform a repertory that includes affectionate spoofs of dance by Gerald Arpino, Kenneth MacMillan, George Balanchine and Fokine, Petipa and others in two programs. Tonight (Program A) and tomorrow (B) at 8 p.m., Symphony Space, Broadway and 95th Street, Manhattan, (212)864-5400. Tickets: $25; $15 for students, children and 65+.
DUNNING

* HAROLD (STUMPY) CROMER AND FRIENDS Mr. Cromer, who has been tap-dancing since 1929, will be joined by Megan Haungs, Traci Mann and Toes Tiranoff, with Frank Owen on the piano, in ''The Truth Lies Here,'' a salute to April. Tomorrow at 8 p.m., Cobi's Place, 158 West 48th Street, Manhattan, (516)922-2010. Tickets: $20.
DUNNING

CHRIS FERRIS AND DANCERS A concert of five dances created within the last two years features dynamic movements within intricate spatial designs. Ms. Ferris's pieces explore contrasts between improvised and set choreography, the way interruptions cause a bouncing sequence to grow erratic and differences between falling into partners' arms and falling to the floor. Tomorrow and Sunday at 8 p.m., Merce Cunningham, Studio, 55 Bethune Street, West Village, (718)672-6965. Tickets: $15.
JACK ANDERSON

FLAMENCO LATINO You don't have to be Spanish to dance flamenco. That might be the motto of the company, directed by Aurora Reyes and Basilio Georges, which will perform in the closest thing they could find to a taverna. Tonight and tomorrow at 8:30 and 11 p.m., Alegrias at La Nacional, 239 West 14th Street, West Village, (212)399-8519. Admission: $10 cover charge.
DUNNING

* MARTHA GRAHAM DANCE COMPANY The current crop of Graham dancers may not look like the ones who originated their roles in the dances from the 1930's into the 50's that will be performed this weekend. These are different times. But this generation suggests that Graham's choreography can be simultaneously exalting and entertaining, particularly in Program B (tonight and Sunday afternoon). In this closing weekend, the company will present a family matinee tomorrow with a post-performance ''Meet the Dancers'' session Martha Clarke's new ''Suenos'' may be seen, along with Graham pieces, tomorrow and Sunday nights. Tonight and tomorrow at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 and 7 p.m., City Center, 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan (212)581-1212. Tickets: $24 to $80.
DUNNING

NEIL GREENBERG Mr. Greenberg's new ''Partial View,'' with music by Zeena Parkins and video by John Jesurun, isn't quite so magical as his last video and dance piece. But it is handsome looking and begins with a haunting solo danced by the choreographer. Tonight and tomorrow at 7:30 p.m., Dance Theater Workshop, 219 West 19th Street, Chelsea, (212)924-0077. Tickets: $25; $15 for students and 65+.
DUNNING

* LINCOLN CENTER 'NEW VISIONS': TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY This trend-setting modern-dance troupe will celebrate its 35th anniversary with two programs. The first (tonight) explores Ms. Brown's choreographic collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg. The second (tomorrow night) includes two New York premieres and the recent ''Geometry of Quiet.'' Tonight and tomorrow at 8 p.m., Rose Theater, Rose Hall, Time Warner Center, Broadway at 60th Street, Manhattan, (212)721-6500 or www.lincolncenter.org. Tickets: $45.
DUNNING

DAVID NEUMANN Mr. Neumann, one of downtown dance's most intriguing performers, teams up in his new ''tough, the tough'' with the filmmaker Hal Hartley and the playwright Will Eno in a work that ''exposes the cognitive maps and geopolitical boundaries that define imaginary landscape inside us and out.'' Consider yourselves warned, possums. Tonight and tomorrow at 8:30 p.m., Danspace Project, St. Mark's Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village, (212)674-8194. Tickets: $15 or TDF voucher.
DUNNING

* NEW YORK THEATER BALLET A discreet little pearl in the oyster of New York dance this weekend, the program features such little known works as Frederick Ashton's 1930 ''Capriol Suite,'' Antony Tudor's ''Main Gauches'' and ''Judgment of Paris,'' Sallie Wilson's ''Romeo and Juliet'' balcony scene and Ron Sequoio's ''Rondo for Seven,'' as well as a tribute to Bobby Short by Lois Bewley and a new ballet by company member Danielle Genest. Tonight and tomorrow (and next Friday and Saturday) at 7:30 p.m., Gould Hall, 55 East 59th Street, Manhattan, (212)307-4100. Tickets: $30; $15 for students and 65+.
DUNNING

NORANEWDANCECO Nora Stephens, a choreographer and video artist, collaborates with composers Ryan Smith and Jeff Snyder on a multimedia program featuring ''Finding You When,'' a new work that concerns connections and misconnections during the course of a lifetime. Tonight and tomorrow at 8, University Settlement, 184 Eldridge Street, Lower East Side, (917)843-9470. Tickets: $12.
ANDERSON

* NRITYAGRAM DANCE ENSEMBLE A company established in 1990 to preserve India's 2000-year old dance traditions offers a program featuring Odissi, the oldest of India's classical dance forms performed by an ensemble of six dancers, three instrumentalists and a singer. Originally a sacred ritual, Odissi conveys spirituality through a sensuous flow of movement marked by lyrical curving gestures that bring to life ancient Indian sculptures. Tonight at 8, tomorrow at 7 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m., Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, (212)242-0800. Tickets: $38.
ANDERSON

LESLIE SATIN AND DANCERS A choreographer known for her rigor offers the premiere of ''Under Cover,'' a collaboration with the video artist Andrew Gurian that evokes a mysterious disturbing moment through a succession of elusive details. The production features three dancers; Iris Rose, an actress who recites a complex text by Ms. Satin, and Roy Nathanson, a saxophonist. Tonight and Sunday at 8, Construction Company, 10 East 18th Street, Manhattan,(212)924-7882. Tickets: $15.
ANDERSON

* STREB S.L.A.M. Ms. Streb's Frequent Flyers -- she's not kidding -- will soar, crash and dodge through dances new and familiar for two more weeks at her Brooklyn studio-theater. Popcorn served. Tonight and tomorrow at 7, Sunday at 3 p.m. Through May 1., S.L.A.M., 51 North First Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718)384-6491. Tickets: $15 adults; $10 children; free for children under 4.
DUNNING

ANDREA WOODS/SOULOWORKS Ms. Woods combines live performance solos with her videodances in a program called ''Bird of Pray,'' with guest artist Hattie Gossett. Tonight and tomorrow at 8:30 p.m., Thalia at Symphony Space, Broadway at 95th Street, Manhattan, (212)864-5400. Tickets: $21; $18 for students and 65+.
DUNNING

YOUTH AMERICA GRAND PRIX 2005 For those who can't get enough of international ballet competitions, this one was created by former Bolshoi Ballet dancers Gennadi (now at American Ballet Theater) and Larissa Saveliev and offers scholarships for ballet training to dancers from 9 to 19, with the grand prize a contract to the ABT Studio Company. Tonight (contemporary dance round) from 6 to 11 p.m.; tomorrow (classical ballet round) from noon to 10 p.m.; Sunday (final round) from 5 to 7 p.m., Martin Luther King High School Auditorium, Amsterdam Avenue and 65th Street, Manhattan. Admission: $10 per round at the door. The competition ends with a gala in which winners perform with dancers from companies including the Royal Ballet, Stuttgart Ballet, New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet and MOMIX. Monday at 7:30 p.m. City Center, 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan, (212)581-1212. Tickets: $15 to $100.
DUNNING

Art

A selective listing by critics of The Times: New or noteworthy art, design and photography shows at New York museums and galleries this weekend. At many museums, children under 12 and members are admitted free. Addresses, unless otherwise noted, are in Manhattan. Most galleries are closed on Sundays and Mondays, but hours vary and should be checked by telephone. Gallery admission is free unless noted. * denotes a highly recommended show. Full reviews of recent shows: nytimes.com/art.

Museums

* 'DIANE ARBUS REVELATIONS,' Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, (212)535-7710, through May 30. Arbus could be cruel, but tenderness and melancholy were her finest modes of expression, the emotions that reveal themselves after her best pictures leave their first impression, which is often alarm. She captured a moment, the anxious 1950's and 60's, and -- this probably applies as much to Arbus as to any other photographer of the second half of the last century -- she captured New York. Appropriately, she is given the royal treatment at the Met, including some maddeningly dark, dense and absurdly theatrical galleries, like chapels, of memorabilia. That said, it touches her favorite subjects with grace. Even the shocking photographs of retarded women are sympathetic, implying that the world is full of wondrous things, if our eyes are open enough to recognize them, and that in the end we are all drawn together by our different flaws. Hours: Sundays, Tuesdays through Thursdays, 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays until 9 p.m. Admission: $15; students, $7 and 65+, $10.
MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

'DANIEL BUREN: THE EYE OF THE STORM,' Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 88th Street, (212)423-3500, through June 8. The latest artist to be given Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim to play with, Mr. Buren has devised a lumbering construction, 81 feet tall, the corner of what would be a cube large enough to enclose the rotunda, mirrored floor to ceiling. Imagine a glass office tower slammed through the front of the building. The spiraling ramps and circular roof complete themselves in the mirrored reflections, which predictably shift and shimmy in slightly queasy-making fashion along with your movement up or down the ramp. There is not much to the work beyond that. The museum's ramps are empty. Alternative panes of the circular skylight are colored with magenta gels, making a kind of checkerboard pattern. This is pretty. Short kelly-green stripes of tape are stuck below the outside rim of the rotunda's parapet. These are not attractive. A suite of Mr. Buren's colored striped paintings from the late 1960's and 70's are eccentrically aligned, Salon style, on adjacent walls of the museum's High Gallery and reflect through the gallery's doorway in the mirrors. They are at once boring and precious. Hours: Saturdays through Wednesdays, 10 a.m. to 5:45 p.m.; Fridays, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Admission: $15; students and 65+, $10.
KIMMELMAN

'CHERISHED POSSESSIONS: A NEW ENGLAND LEGACY,' Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture, 18 West 86th Street (212)501-3000, through June 5. More than 100 choice objects from that vast attic of family relics, Historic New England (formerly the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities), appear in this show, from such humble objects as a relic box containing two worm-eaten pieces of 17th-century bread to a grand Copley portrait (1793) of Richard Codman, a handsome profligate from Boston known for his wit, charm and lavish spending. What makes the show different from hundreds of others devoted to American antiques is that, thanks in no small part to bright captioning, it does convey a sense of family connection with the objects. And it gets into the 20th century with modernist furnishings from the Massachusetts home of Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, who left Hitler's Germany in 1938 for a teaching post at Harvard. Hours: Tuesdays through Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Admission: $3.
GRACE GLUECK

SUE DE BEER, 'BLACK SUN,' Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, 120 Park Avenue at 42nd Street, (800)944-8639, through June 24. Shown in a simplified, walk-in, pink castle, "Black Sun" is a Paul McCarthyesque video projected on two screens about teenage girlhood that alternates passages of lyrical visual beauty and emotional poignancy with periods of aimless tedium. Though it is tempered by irony, the psychological urgency suggests that Ms. de Beer, who is in her early 30's, is still wrestling with her own adolescent conflicts about being good, being bad and being loved. Hours: Mondays through Fridays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Admission: free.
KEN JOHNSON

* 'EDGE OF DESIRE: RECENT ART IN INDIA', Asia Society, 725 Park Avenue at 70th Street, (212)288-6400 and at the Queens Museum of Art, New York City Building, Flushing Meadows, Corona Park, Queens, (718)592-9700 both through June 5. Also, "Fatal Love: South Asian American Art Now," Queens Museum of Art through June 5. "Edge of Desire," spread over two venues, is a highly selective, multi-generational survey of different kinds of contemporary art being made in India. The senior figure here, K.G. Subramanyan, born in 1924, has over the years embraced craft, folk, and tribal traditions, as well as popular culture and academic modernism. The show does the same in work from mid-career figures like Nalini Malani and Vivan Sundaram, to newcomers like Shilpa Gupta, Swarna and Manu Chitrakar, and L.N. Tallur. The smaller portion of the show is at Asia Society; the more expansive and varied section in Queens. Also in Queens is "Fatal Love," a lively but subtle showcase of young artists, many of them women, many living in New York. This show alone is worth a trip to Flushing Meadows. Park Avenue location hours: Tuesdays through Sundays 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Fridays, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Admission: $10; 65+, $7; students with ID, $5; members and under 16, free.
HOLLAND COTTER

"MAX ERNST: A RETROSPECTIVE" remains at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, (212)535-7710, through July 10. Max Ernst (1891-1976) is one of modernism's mystery men. He is everywhere in the history of European art between the wars, closely associated with two of the century's wild-and-craziest movements, Dada and Surrealism, yet he never quite materializes. Both despite and because of his elusiveness he remains an artist of some interest, and there are intriguing things in this large survey. They range from some of the earliest paintings to be officially labeled Surrealist, to near-abstract images generated by chance techniques, to examples of the collage-style books some consider Ernst's masterworks. On the positive side, his refusal of a signature style is evidence of his anti-authoritarian instincts. Too often, however, it produced art that looks like brilliant busywork. Only when he is responding to specific events, like war, does his art snap into focus. Hours and admission: see above.
COTTER

* TIM HAWKINSON, Whitney Museum of American Art, Madison Avenue at 75th Street, (212)570-3676, through May 29. On the gee-whiz meter, Tim Hawkinson skews high. His midcareer retrospective, like a mad scientists' fair of screwball contraptions, hopscotches from one dexterous tour de force to the next. Each requires some head-scratching decipherment, inviting admiration for its doggedness, while not straining too hard to earn a viewer's love. Feats of physical fancy, when so dizzily executed, can be their own justification. Mr. Hawkinson's larger purpose, you might say, is simply wonderment. At the same time the art borrows a healthy strain of ludicrous wit from Samuel Beckett, who knew a thing or two about how to clown around smartly. Hours: Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Friday 1 to 9 p.m.; closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Admission: $12; students and 62+, $9.50; children 12 and under, free.
KIMMELMAN

* 'HUGO BOSS PRIZE 2004: RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA,' Solomon R. Guggeheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, (212)423-3500, through May 11. For his Guggenheim solo show, Rikrit Tirvanija, winner of the 2004 Hugo Boss prize, has built a low-power television station from inexpensive materials in one of the museum's galleries, and papered the walls with instructions on how anyone and everyone can do the same. What looks like a glorified science-fair project comes with specific social context. The airwaves, which carry transmissions, are technically United States government property. Unlicensed broadcast is illegal and licenses are hard to get. Federal control of its communications resources has further tightened in recent years, inspiring a wave of illegal transmissions from stations like this one, which could contribute to grassroots protest against perceived restrictions on first amendment rights. Here, Mr. Tiravanija's art-linked-to-life aesthetic moves outside the art-world to the real world, a significant, potentially far-reaching shift. Hours and admission: see above.
COTTER

'LITTLE BOY: THE ARTS OF JAPAN'S EXPLODING SUBCULTURE,' Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street (212)832-1155, through July 24. With Godzilla and Hello Kitty presiding, this eye-boggling show traces the unexamined legacy of World War II as played out in Japan's popular culture and its high incidence of mushroom clouds, bionic heroes, building-crunching monsters and hyper-cute cartoon characters. Masterminded by the artist-writer-entrepreneur Takashi Murakami (of Vuitton bag fame), and organized in collaboration with the Public Arts Fund, it reveals how this culture was twisted and darkened by the otaku, or geek, subculture, which has in turn influenced the work of younger artists like Yoshitomo Nara, Chinatsu Ban and the artist currently known as Mr.
ROBERTA SMITH

'PORTRAITS OF AN AGE: PHOTOGRAPHY IN GERMANY AND AUSTRIA, 1900-1938,' Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue, at 86th Street, (212)628-6200, through June 6. More than 100 faces make up the cast of this show. The portraits were shot by 35 photographers active in the two countries, among them Lotte Jacobi, Josef Albers, Gisele Freund, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and August Sander. Their images not only give a sense of the rich cultural life in Austria and Germany before the Nazis but also help trace the history of photography during the period. More important, this savvy show homes in on the changing ways people presented themselves in an era of rapidly turning social values.
GLUECK

* 'CY TWOMBLY: FIFTY YEARS OF WORKS ON PAPER,' Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, (212)570-3676, through May 8. Despite the "works on paper" label, this is basically a show of paintings. It starts in the 1950's, when Mr. Twombly, closely entwined with the artist Robert Rauschenberg, developed a personal anti-aesthetic in which scribbling was a form draftsmanship, gouging and scratching was gestural painting. After moving to Italy, words appeared frequently in the work: obscenities, the names of gods, quotations from Roman epics, scraps of Romantic poetry. It was as if Western cultural history was unfolding on the walls of a toilet stall. Closer to the present the work turns lush and perfumed, into a kind of horticultural expressionism that is both appetizing and uningratiating. Hours and admission: see above.
COTTER

Galleries: Uptown

PETER HOWSON, 'CHRISTOS ANESTE,' Flowers, 1000 Madison Avenue at 77th Street, (212)439-1700, through May 7. Working with a sharp pencil on small square panels in a profusely detailed, expressionistic and sometimes hallucinatory style that harks back to the Northern Renaissance, this British artist brings impressive skill and tragi-comic verve to subjects like the trials of Jesus, the temptation of St. Anthony and the delusions of Don Quixote. His small, brushy and comparatively sentimental paintings are disappointing, but there are fewer of them.
JOHNSON

Galleries: SoHo

* '3 X ABSTRACTION: NEW METHODS OF DRAWING BY HILMA AF KLIMT, EMMA KUNZ AND AGNES MARTIN,' The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, (212)219-2166, through May 21. This fascinating and beautiful exhibition presents mostly abstract, geometric drawings by three women thought to have been motivated largely by spiritual purposes. The Swedish af Klimt and the Swiss Kunz were mystics for whom drawing was a way to represent or channel supernatural dimensions of the universe. Martin, on the other hand, was a Modernist more interested in the Zen-esque experience of the here and now in art and nature.
JOHNSON

Galleries: Chelsea

ERIC FISCHL, Mary Boone, 541 West 24th Street, (212)752-2929, through April 23. Like the ones in his last show at this gallery, Mr. Fischl's paintings are based on his own photographs of hired models behaving like jaded sophisticates during a daytime love-making session or at home after a late night party. The paintings are suavely made with wide brushes in muted colors and they capture complex patterns of light broken up by venetian blinds. But a frustrating vagueness about what is going on in the pictures limits the psychological intrigue.
JOHNSON

MARK HEYER, Lohin Geduld, 531 West 25th Street, (212)675-2656, through April 23. Mr. Heyer's small, folksy narrative paintings of subjects like a tornado approaching a Midwestern farm, a circus act under the big top and sexy women getting dressed in their rooms look as if they were made in the 1920's and 30's by a simple-minded colleague of Edward Hopper and Charles Burchfield. That they are actually clever Postmodernist simulations does not prevent them from being nostalgically enchanting.
JOHNSON

'IAN KIAER: THE GREY CLOTH' Tanya Bonakdar Gallery 521 West 21st Street, Chelsea (212)414-4144, through April 30. Inspired by a little-known 1914 novel by the German architecture critic Paul Scheerbart, the five installation pieces in this show work quite well as a neurasthenic environment whose arrangements of pale monochromes and pale found objects abjectly elegize the building blocks of modernism.
SMITH

JONAS MEKAS: 'FRAGMENTS OF PARADISE,' Maya Stendhal, 545 West 20th Street, (212)366-1549, through April 30. Born in Lithuania in 1922, Mr. Mekas survived a Nazi forced labor camp to become one of the most influential and revered members of the New York avant garde film-making community. This retrospective sampler presents short and long, typically low-production, diaristic films from the past five decades on video screens. Also, a cacophonous, 12-monitor installation shows 24 hours in the life of the artist and his family, a piece that was inspired by an idea of Ferdinand Leger's.
JOHNSON

HERV?DI ROSA: 'THE SOLO GROUP SHOW,' Haim Chanin, 210 Eleventh Avenue at 24th Street, (646)230-7200, through April 23. An antic chameleon of an artist, this French Neo-Popster presents more than 500 small, framed paintings and drawings in four large clusters. Mr. di Rosa's ability to imitate many different styles -- including underground comics, geometric abstraction, Surrealism and realism -- is impressive, but it is the gleeful irreverence and love of absurdity holding it all together that wins you over.
JOHNSON

MAGNUS VON PLESSEN, Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street (212)206-9300, through April 23. In the artist's eagerness to suggest fluctuating moods and rapid shifting of perceptions, and to avoid the "literalness" that painting can fall into, he puts down fugitive images (often derived initially from photographs) that are done in by paint or the lack of it. One example is "Discontinued," a large teetery structure that amounts to a suggestion of a building with most of its vitals left out. Paint, or its strategic omission, the artist seems to say, trumps imagery. In more talented hands, this is often true, but not here.
GLUECK

Last Chance

JOHN ALTOON: 'PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS, 1961-67,' Luise Ross Gallery, 568 Broadway, at Prince Street, SoHo, (212)343-2161, closing tomorrow. In the last years of his short life, Altoon (1925-1969) broke out of the freewheeling West Coast mode of Abstract Expressionism to zero in on more personal images -- some dreamy, others explicitly sexual, still others biomorphic doodles -- that floated through his fantasy. One of the most amusing -- and accessible -- of these works is ''Untitled (Bathtub)'' of 1967. It depicts a woman bathing as a poodle awaits her emergence. But her attention is riveted on a small demonic man who has set fire to her bath water. Altoon's deft, light touch mates well with his fine sense of the silly.
GLUECK

ALYSON SHOTZ, 'MOMENT IN TIME AND SPACE,' Derek Eller, 526-30 West 25th Street, Chelsea, (212)206-6411, closing tomorrow. This resourceful sculptor has hung an expansive, undulating, floor-to-ceiling curtain in the middle of the gallery. It was made by stapling together thousands of ovals cut from plastic magnifying sheets. The kaleidoscopic optical effects are delightfully confounding.
JOHNSON

STANLEY WHITNEY, Esso, 531 West 26th Street, Chelsea, (212)560-9728, closing tomorrow You might not have thought the tired old genre of grid-based abstract painting still had in it works as buoyantly radiant as these. Painted with a dry, flat and slightly brushy touch, Mr. Whitney's blocks of near-pure color, separated by horizontal bands like books on a bookshelf, have a syncopated chromatic rhythm that is a pleasure to behold.
JOHNSON

Photos: MOVIES -- Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon star in the Farrelly brothers' ''Fever Pitch,'' Page 24. (Photo by Darren Michaels/20th Century Fox); DANCE -- New York Ballet Theater presents a program of little-known works like Frederick Ashton's 1930 ''Capriol Suite'' -- as well as a tribute to Bobby Short -- at Gould Hall in Manhattan this weekend, Page 26. (Photo by Richard Termine); ART -- Aya Takano's ''Night Walk -- A Pink Moon Emerged'' is on view at Japan Society, Page 26. (Photo by Kaikai Kiki)

KEN JOHNSON

* 'EDGE OF DESIRE: RECENT ART IN INDIA', Asia Society, 725 Park Avenue at 70th Street, (212)288-6400 and at the Queens Museum of Art, New York City Building, Flushing Meadows, Corona Park, Queens, (718)592-9700 both through June 5. Also, "Fatal Love: South Asian American Art Now," Queens Museum of Art through June 5. "Edge of Desire," spread over two venues, is a highly selective, multi-generational survey of different kinds of contemporary art being made in India. The senior figure here, K.G. Subramanyan, born in 1924, has over the years embraced craft, folk, and tribal traditions, as well as popular culture and academic modernism. The show does the same in work from mid-career figures like Nalini Malani and Vivan Sundaram, to newcomers like Shilpa Gupta, Swarna and Manu Chitrakar, and L.N. Tallur. The smaller portion of the show is at Asia Society; the more expansive and varied section in Queens. Also in Queens is "Fatal Love," a lively but subtle showcase of young artists, many of them women, many living in New York. This show alone is worth a trip to Flushing Meadows. Park Avenue location hours: Tuesdays through Sundays 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Fridays, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Admission: $10; 65+, $7; students with ID, $5; members and under 16, free.
HOLLAND COTTER

"MAX ERNST: A RETROSPECTIVE" remains at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, (212)535-7710, through July 10. Max Ernst (1891-1976) is one of modernism's mystery men. He is everywhere in the history of European art between the wars, closely associated with two of the century's wild-and-craziest movements, Dada and Surrealism, yet he never quite materializes. Both despite and because of his elusiveness he remains an artist of some interest, and there are intriguing things in this large survey. They range from some of the earliest paintings to be officially labeled Surrealist, to near-abstract images generated by chance techniques, to examples of the collage-style books some consider Ernst's masterworks. On the positive side, his refusal of a signature style is evidence of his anti-authoritarian instincts. Too often, however, it produced art that looks like brilliant busywork. Only when he is responding to specific events, like war, does his art snap into focus. Hours and admission: see above.
COTTER

* TIM HAWKINSON, Whitney Museum of American Art, Madison Avenue at 75th Street, (212)570-3676, through May 29. On the gee-whiz meter, Tim Hawkinson skews high. His midcareer retrospective, like a mad scientists' fair of screwball contraptions, hopscotches from one dexterous tour de force to the next. Each requires some head-scratching decipherment, inviting admiration for its doggedness, while not straining too hard to earn a viewer's love. Feats of physical fancy, when so dizzily executed, can be their own justification. Mr. Hawkinson's larger purpose, you might say, is simply wonderment. At the same time the art borrows a healthy strain of ludicrous wit from Samuel Beckett, who knew a thing or two about how to clown around smartly. Hours: Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Friday 1 to 9 p.m.; closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Admission: $12; students and 62+, $9.50; children 12 and under, free.
KIMMELMAN

* 'HUGO BOSS PRIZE 2004: RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA,' Solomon R. Guggeheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, (212)423-3500, through May 11. For his Guggenheim solo show, Rikrit Tirvanija, winner of the 2004 Hugo Boss prize, has built a low-power television station from inexpensive materials in one of the museum's galleries, and papered the walls with instructions on how anyone and everyone can do the same. What looks like a glorified science-fair project comes with specific social context. The airwaves, which carry transmissions, are technically United States government property. Unlicensed broadcast is illegal and licenses are hard to get. Federal control of its communications resources has further tightened in recent years, inspiring a wave of illegal transmissions from stations like this one, which could contribute to grassroots protest against perceived restrictions on first amendment rights. Here, Mr. Tiravanija's art-linked-to-life aesthetic moves outside the art-world to the real world, a significant, potentially far-reaching shift. Hours and admission: see above.
COTTER

'LITTLE BOY: THE ARTS OF JAPAN'S EXPLODING SUBCULTURE,' Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street (212)832-1155, through July 24. With Godzilla and Hello Kitty presiding, this eye-boggling show traces the unexamined legacy of World War II as played out in Japan's popular culture and its high incidence of mushroom clouds, bionic heroes, building-crunching monsters and hyper-cute cartoon characters. Masterminded by the artist-writer-entrepreneur Takashi Murakami (of Vuitton bag fame), and organized in collaboration with the Public Arts Fund, it reveals how this culture was twisted and darkened by the otaku, or geek, subculture, which has in turn influenced the work of younger artists like Yoshitomo Nara, Chinatsu Ban and the artist currently known as Mr.
ROBERTA SMITH

'PORTRAITS OF AN AGE: PHOTOGRAPHY IN GERMANY AND AUSTRIA, 1900-1938,' Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue, at 86th Street, (212)628-6200, through June 6. More than 100 faces make up the cast of this show. The portraits were shot by 35 photographers active in the two countries, among them Lotte Jacobi, Josef Albers, Gisele Freund, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and August Sander. Their images not only give a sense of the rich cultural life in Austria and Germany before the Nazis but also help trace the history of photography during the period. More important, this savvy show homes in on the changing ways people presented themselves in an era of rapidly turning social values.
GLUECK

* 'CY TWOMBLY: FIFTY YEARS OF WORKS ON PAPER,' Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, (212)570-3676, through May 8. Despite the "works on paper" label, this is basically a show of paintings. It starts in the 1950's, when Mr. Twombly, closely entwined with the artist Robert Rauschenberg, developed a personal anti-aesthetic in which scribbling was a form draftsmanship, gouging and scratching was gestural painting. After moving to Italy, words appeared frequently in the work: obscenities, the names of gods, quotations from Roman epics, scraps of Romantic poetry. It was as if Western cultural history was unfolding on the walls of a toilet stall. Closer to the present the work turns lush and perfumed, into a kind of horticultural expressionism that is both appetizing and uningratiating. Hours and admission: see above.
COTTER

Galleries: Uptown

PETER HOWSON, 'CHRISTOS ANESTE,' Flowers, 1000 Madison Avenue at 77th Street, (212)439-1700, through May 7. Working with a sharp pencil on small square panels in a profusely detailed, expressionistic and sometimes hallucinatory style that harks back to the Northern Renaissance, this British artist brings impressive skill and tragi-comic verve to subjects like the trials of Jesus, the temptation of St. Anthony and the delusions of Don Quixote. His small, brushy and comparatively sentimental paintings are disappointing, but there are fewer of them.
JOHNSON

Galleries: SoHo

* '3 X ABSTRACTION: NEW METHODS OF DRAWING BY HILMA AF KLIMT, EMMA KUNZ AND AGNES MARTIN,' The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, (212)219-2166, through May 21. This fascinating and beautiful exhibition presents mostly abstract, geometric drawings by three women thought to have been motivated largely by spiritual purposes. The Swedish af Klimt and the Swiss Kunz were mystics for whom drawing was a way to represent or channel supernatural dimensions of the universe. Martin, on the other hand, was a Modernist more interested in the Zen-esque experience of the here and now in art and nature.
JOHNSON

Galleries: Chelsea

ERIC FISCHL, Mary Boone, 541 West 24th Street, (212)752-2929, through April 23. Like the ones in his last show at this gallery, Mr. Fischl's paintings are based on his own photographs of hired models behaving like jaded sophisticates during a daytime love-making session or at home after a late night party. The paintings are suavely made with wide brushes in muted colors and they capture complex patterns of light broken up by venetian blinds. But a frustrating vagueness about what is going on in the pictures limits the psychological intrigue.
JOHNSON

MARK HEYER, Lohin Geduld, 531 West 25th Street, (212)675-2656, through April 23. Mr. Heyer's small, folksy narrative paintings of subjects like a tornado approaching a Midwestern farm, a circus act under the big top and sexy women getting dressed in their rooms look as if they were made in the 1920's and 30's by a simple-minded colleague of Edward Hopper and Charles Burchfield. That they are actually clever Postmodernist simulations does not prevent them from being nostalgically enchanting.
JOHNSON

'IAN KIAER: THE GREY CLOTH' Tanya Bonakdar Gallery 521 West 21st Street, Chelsea (212)414-4144, through April 30. Inspired by a little-known 1914 novel by the German architecture critic Paul Scheerbart, the five installation pieces in this show work quite well as a neurasthenic environment whose arrangements of pale monochromes and pale found objects abjectly elegize the building blocks of modernism.
SMITH

JONAS MEKAS: 'FRAGMENTS OF PARADISE,' Maya Stendhal, 545 West 20th Street, (212)366-1549, through April 30. Born in Lithuania in 1922, Mr. Mekas survived a Nazi forced labor camp to become one of the most influential and revered members of the New York avant garde film-making community. This retrospective sampler presents short and long, typically low-production, diaristic films from the past five decades on video screens. Also, a cacophonous, 12-monitor installation shows 24 hours in the life of the artist and his family, a piece that was inspired by an idea of Ferdinand Leger's.
JOHNSON

HERVÉ DI ROSA: 'THE SOLO GROUP SHOW,' Haim Chanin, 210 Eleventh Avenue at 24th Street, (646)230-7200, through April 23. An antic chameleon of an artist, this French Neo-Popster presents more than 500 small, framed paintings and drawings in four large clusters. Mr. di Rosa's ability to imitate many different styles -- including underground comics, geometric abstraction, Surrealism and realism -- is impressive, but it is the gleeful irreverence and love of absurdity holding it all together that wins you over.
JOHNSON

MAGNUS VON PLESSEN, Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street (212)206-9300, through April 23. In the artist's eagerness to suggest fluctuating moods and rapid shifting of perceptions, and to avoid the "literalness" that painting can fall into, he puts down fugitive images (often derived initially from photographs) that are done in by paint or the lack of it. One example is "Discontinued," a large teetery structure that amounts to a suggestion of a building with most of its vitals left out. Paint, or its strategic omission, the artist seems to say, trumps imagery. In more talented hands, this is often true, but not here.
GLUECK

Last Chance

JOHN ALTOON: 'PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS, 1961-67,' Luise Ross Gallery, 568 Broadway, at Prince Street, SoHo, (212)343-2161, closing tomorrow. In the last years of his short life, Altoon (1925-1969) broke out of the freewheeling West Coast mode of Abstract Expressionism to zero in on more personal images -- some dreamy, others explicitly sexual, still others biomorphic doodles -- that floated through his fantasy. One of the most amusing -- and accessible -- of these works is ''Untitled (Bathtub)'' of 1967. It depicts a woman bathing as a poodle awaits her emergence. But her attention is riveted on a small demonic man who has set fire to her bath water. Altoon's deft, light touch mates well with his fine sense of the silly.
GLUECK

ALYSON SHOTZ, 'MOMENT IN TIME AND SPACE,' Derek Eller, 526-30 West 25th Street, Chelsea, (212)206-6411, closing tomorrow. This resourceful sculptor has hung an expansive, undulating, floor-to-ceiling curtain in the middle of the gallery. It was made by stapling together thousands of ovals cut from plastic magnifying sheets. The kaleidoscopic optical effects are delightfully confounding.
JOHNSON

STANLEY WHITNEY, Esso, 531 West 26th Street, Chelsea, (212)560-9728, closing tomorrow You might not have thought the tired old genre of grid-based abstract painting still had in it works as buoyantly radiant as these. Painted with a dry, flat and slightly brushy touch, Mr. Whitney's blocks of near-pure color, separated by horizontal bands like books on a bookshelf, have a syncopated chromatic rhythm that is a pleasure to behold.
JOHNSON
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